LANSING, Mich. — The state of Michigan is the first state in the country to sue four major opioid distributors as drug dealers.
Attorney General Dana Nessel's office filed the civil lawsuit against Cardinal Health Inc., McKesson Corporation, AmerisourceBergen Drug Corporation, and Walgreens Inc. on Tuesday.
Nessel says they all distributed more opioids than they knew would be necessary for medical treatment.
"Cardinal Health, McKesson Corporation, AmerisourceBergen and Walgreens all used their licenses to distribute controlled substances in Michigan as a cover for what is essentially a criminal enterprise," said Nessel.
The lawsuit accused those four companies of acting like drug dealers and contributing to the state's opioid crisis. Kelly Rossman-McKinney, Communications Director for Nessel said the bold language is necessary to express the seriousness of the issue.
"A distributor is distributing drugs to consumers no differently than a drug dealer on the corner, so the decision ultimately was that the best approach to these distributors was to treat them like the drug dealers they are," said Rossman-McKinney.
The lawsuit cites Michigan Drug Dealer Liability Act. It's a law Attorney Dustyn Coontz says is rarely used but creative.
"I think Attorney General Nessel is being pretty audacious here. It is to my knowledge unprecedented, so someone at the Attorney Generals office found this old law that I think was enacted in the mid nineties sometime and it is their idea to make it apply to these big companies," said Coontz.
Nessel is hoping to win a huge settlement for the state close to $1 billion. It'll be up to the legislature how that money will be spent, but the Executive Director of Mid-Michigan Recovery Services, Patrick Patterson, hopes the money will goes back to agencies helping people impacted.
"We have terrible impacts on folks, and of course families are badly impacted. It's great to see litigation at this level, but even a step down farther, it's the families. It's those who have died and suffered from the powerful effects of opioid addiction that are the real victims in this process," said Patterson. "We have to remember that what's going on here-this isn't a distribution system as simple as cracking open another beer you don't need. This is about chemically engineered stuff that's designed to be very powerful and unfortunately the downside is it's very dangerous and so whenever we're proscribing, taking, distributing these drugs great caution is required, and then whenever we have a profit motive involved with a dangerous thing, of course that causes grave concern."
Some of the reasons Nessel listed for this lawsuit is that the four companies didn't report or investigate suspicious orders.
In 2017, drug overdoses in Michigan killed nearly 27,000 people, 2,053 of those deaths were because of opioids according to the Michigan Department of Heath and Human Services.
Nessel said the state will likely go after even more companies later. News ten reached out to the Michigan Pharmacists Association for a response and a representative told us they're in the process of reviewing the lawsuit.
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