BOSTON — Representatives of some of the nation’s largest generic drug manufacturers used code words to collude with competitors to divvy up market share and coordinate price increases according to a federal lawsuit. In another email, representatives from three companies talk about coordinating “polite f-u” letters in 2014 in response to a congressional probe into price increases in the generic …
Drug distributor McKesson Corp. has agreed to pay $37 million to resolve claims brought by West Virginia officials that the company helped fuel the opioid epidemic, the two sides said Thursday. The deal resolves one piece of opioid-related liability for McKesson but leaves open many more. The San Francisco-based distributor is among roughly two dozen companies up and down the drug supply chain …
A whistleblower lawsuit accused a US pharmaceuticals giant of lavishly bribing doctors and their staff to increase sales of a drug, offering them Starbucks gift cards, free Las Vegas trips and sponsored happy hours to prescribe it even for potentially unsafe uses. The company is Mallinckrodt and the drug is H.P. Some of these uses are “unapproved, unsafe and potentially ineffective,” according …
A dispute over “sanctuary cities” between the city of Chicago and the federal Justice Department has had a ripple effect neither side could have anticipated: It has essentially blocked all of Kentucky’s drug task forces from receiving a larger portion of the funding they need to keep operating. David Thompson, executive director of the Pennyrile Narcotics Task Force, says the loss in federal …
Both the legislation to regulate Florida’s booming medical marijuana industry and Amendment 2 might be in the rearview mirror, but House bill sponsor Ray Rodrigues and Orlando attorney John Morgan aren’t done sparring over medical marijuana just yet. On Monday, Florida House Majority Leader and primary sponsor for the bill to regulate Florida’s medical marijuana industry, Ray Rodrigues, …
A Collierville man has been awarded more than $140 million in a lawsuit against the makers of a testosterone drug that he says caused him to have a heart attack. A federal court jury in Chicago handed down the verdict in favor of Jeffrey Konrad on Thursday after several weeks of testimony in which his lawyers argued that Chicago-based AbbVie Inc. misrepresented the risks of its drug known as AndroGel. AbbVie was ordered to pay …
He was a nocturnal creature who gambled all night and slept all day. He took Valium at times for anxiousness, and had the doctor who prescribed it to him on retainer. He wagered up to a million dollars a night, but wandered around glitzy Las Vegas casinos in sweatpants and flip-flops, and carried his own drink into the high rollers’ area because he didn’t want to tip the waitresses …
CHRIS BURY: In Ohio, the climbing costs of the opioid epidemic are reflected in the shattered lives of people like Ashley Taylor. For the 26-year-old single mother of three, the road to addiction began in high school with pain pills often stolen from parents of friends. By 16, she was snorting, then shooting, heroin, because it was cheaper and easy to buy in the small southern Ohio town of …
St. Lawrence County legislators have agreed to meet with an attorney about the possibility of joining a class action lawsuit against companies that manufacture opioids. County Attorney Stephen D. Button said several months ago he was contacted by several firms involved in large-scale, multi-defendant opioid litigation. “They were interested in gauging the county’s interest in pursuing …
Louisville is taking aim at the nation’s largest drug distributors by filing a new lawsuit demanding that they pay for the city’s overdose epidemic. Jefferson County Attorney Mike O’Connell knows all about the horrors of that epidemic — not just as a city official, but as a dad. “This is an insidious monster,” he said.