The US state of Massachusetts on Thursday sued Publicis Health, a company owned by the French giant Publicis, which it accuses of having contributed to the opiate crisis by helping the Purdue laboratory to push doctors to prescribe its anti drug. -OxyContin pain.
“Responsibility for the opioid crisis runs throughout the industry, from Purdue and the Sackler family to consultants and partners like McKinsey and Publicis,” Massachusetts Attorney Maura Healey said in a statement.
In the lawsuit filed in Suffolk County Court, the prosecutor claims that, through dozens of contracts awarded between 2010 and 2019, worth more than $50 million, “Publicis engaged in a myriad of unfair and that have plagued OxyContin prescribing across the country, including in Massachusetts.”
Among these “strategies”, the prosecutor cites actions aimed at “combating the hesitations” of prescribing doctors, pushing doctors to prescribe OxyContin rather than lower-dose opiates, and over longer periods of time – all elements which increase the risk of addiction.
Massachusetts is asking the court to find that Publicis Health “created a public nuisance” and to order the company to pay “compensatory” damages in an unspecified amount.
“All of our work was completely legal,” responded a spokesperson for Publicis Health in a statement, saying that the alleged facts fell within the scope of the prescription.
“Publicis Health was acting solely as an agency” and was only “executing Purdue’s plan and buying space,” he added, accusing the prosecutor of taking statements “out of context” .
An increase in legal attacks
American states have attacked in recent years not only Purdue, which filed for bankruptcy in 2019, but many companies they consider jointly responsible for the devastation caused by OxyContin.
In February, the States thus obtained from the consulting firm McKinsey that it pays 573 million dollars to settle the legal proceedings launched once morest it for having contributed to the opiate crisis.
Since Monday, three major American distributors of opiate drugs have appeared for the first time in federal court in West Virginia, accused of having flooded this state, among the poorest in the United States, painkiller pills, causing tens of thousands overdoses.
A rise in overdoses
Before the pandemic, the opioid crisis and the surge in overdoses it caused — with an estimated 500,000 deaths in the United States since 1999 — seemed to be stabilizing.
But the number of overdose deaths rose once more in 2020, reaching a record of more than 87,000 deaths from September 2019 to September 2020, according to federal figures released in April.
AFP