A new proposed class action lawsuit is seeking compensation for Quebecers who’ve suffered from opioid addiction, targeting 27 companies that manufactured, marketed or sold the drugs and “deliberately misrepresented” the effects of opioids.

The class action application, filed in Montreal on Thursday, seeks $30,000 in damages for each member of the class in addition to $25 million from each company to be distributed among members for punitive damages.

The application also seeks compensation for the direct heirs of people who died after suffering from opioid addiction. It will need to be authorized by a judge before it can move forward.

The drugs listed in the application include fentanyl, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, methadone, morphine, oxycodone and oxymorphone. Eligible class members need to have been prescribed the drugs since 1996 and have suffered from opioid use disorder.

“These drugs are dangerously addictive,” the 38-page application says, “and the growing number of addictions, overdoses and deaths in Quebec and Canada caused by opioids has been declared by the Government of Canada to be a public health emergency.”

The companies, it argues, “had an obligation to both ensure the safety and the safe use of their products and to properly warn, rather than misinform, of the risks associated with their products.”

The suit is filed on behalf of an anonymous Montreal woman who became addicted to opioids for seven years after being prescribed Hydromorph Contin to treat chronic pain.

It says the woman worked at a Montreal university for more than 30 years and wants to be the lead plaintiff, in part, to break the stigma associated with opioid addiction.

“The Plaintiff remembers meeting with her family doctor when the decision to prescribe this drug was made,” the document says. “The doctor very clearly told her that they, implying family physicians, had been advised that they had been underprescribing opioids and that opioids were the drug of choice to treat pain.”

The woman became increasingly addicted to opioids as her tolerance to the drugs increased.

In 2017, she was entered into a “gruelling” month-long, in-patient medical detox in the psychiatry ward at the Montreal General Hospital. The woman says the detoxification process lasted for another six months after being released.

“She describes her time under the influence of opioids as a seven-year sentence of ‘brain fog,’ depression and suicidal ideation,” the application says. “Her time on prescription opioids as horrific, and as having caused her to lose more than seven years of her life, which she can never get back.”

The suit argues the companies “chose profits over the health of the consumers” by hiding how addictive opioids are in order to boost sales.

It cites statistics from the 2019 National Report on Opioid Related Deaths that shows that, in Quebec, there were 166 deaths in 2016 related to opioid and other illicit drug use, 181 deaths in 2017, and 300 deaths between January and September 2018.

“The impact of the opioid crisis in Quebec is being felt more urgently with each passing year,” it says.

The class action application has been filed by the law firms Trudel Johnston & Lespérance and Fishman Flanz Meland Paquin.