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Opening statements in the country’s first trial over whether a pharmaceutical company is liable for the opioid crisis began as a battle between fire and ice: Lawyers for Oklahoma, a state brought to its knees by addiction and overdose deaths, heatedly accused Johnson & Johnson of creating a deadly demand for the drugs, while the company coolly responded that it had acted responsibly and lawfully in its quest to offer relief to chronic pain patients. (Hoffman, 5/28)

J&J and its Janssen unit used a “deceitful, multibillion-dollar brainwashing campaign’’ to dupe doctors into prescribing the powerful medications for unapproved ailments, causing a wave of fatal overdoses and addiction woes, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter said at the start of a trial in the state’s claim against the company. (Feeley, 5/28)

The case, which is being heard before a judge and not a jury, is the first to go to trial of some 2,000 lawsuits filed by states, local governments and Native American tribes alleging the pharmaceutical industry helped fuel the opioid crisis. The state argues that Johnson & Johnson followed in the footsteps of Purdue Pharma LP, whose 1996 introduction of OxyContin is widely seen as the beginning of a shift by drug companies toward promoting opioids for widespread pain. That shift played down the risk of addiction and created a public-health crisis, plaintiffs argue, for which the pharmaceutical industry should now pay to alleviate. (Randazzo, 5/28)

Corporate greed is responsible for an opioid crisis that has cost Oklahoma thousands of lives and will take billions of dollars to repair, the state’s attorney general told a judge Tuesday at the start of the nation’s first state trial against the companies accused of fueling the problem. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter’s opened the state’s case against consumer products giant Johnson & Johnson and several subsidiaries by saying the powerful painkillers have led to the “worst manmade public health crisis” in U.S. history. The state alleges drugmakers extensively marketed highly addictive opioids for years in a way that overstated their effectiveness and underplayed the risk of addiction. (Murphy, 5/28)

Brad Beckworth, a lawyer for the state, told Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman that New Brunswick, New Jersey-based J&J, along with Purdue and Teva, used misleading marketing beginning in the 1990s to push doctors to prescribe more opioids. Beckworth said J&J, which sold the painkillers Duragesic and Nucynta, marketed the opioids as "safe and effective for everyday pain" while downplaying their addictive qualities, helping create a drug oversupply. He said J&J was motivated to boost prescriptions not only because it sold opioid painkillers, but because it also grew and imported raw materials opioid manufacturers like Purdue used. "If you have an oversupply, people will die," Beckworth said. (5/28)

The company countered that its products make up just a tiny portion of the painkillers that have been consumed in Oklahoma, and it said its business — from the poppy farms of Tasmania to its products in U.S. drugstores — is closely regulated by federal and state agencies. With manufacturers, distributors, doctors and pharmacists all involved in bringing painkillers to patients, the state cannot prove that Johnson & Johnson caused rampant addiction and overdose deaths, its attorney said. (Bernstein, 5/28)

The Oklahoma trial, which is being broadcast online, is expected to last for much of the summer, drawing renewed attention to a health crisis that is still claiming 130 U.S. lives a day. The testimony will focus on how much manufacturers of highly addictive painkillers are to blame for getting patients hooked on opioids through misleading medical claims and aggressive marketing practices. (Demko, 5/28)

The police huddled for hours each day, headphones on, eavesdropping on the doctor. They'd tapped his cellphone, bugged his office, planted a camera in a trattoria. They heard him boast about his power to help Big Pharma make millions pushing painkillers, and about all the money they say he was paid in exchange. Now Dr. Guido Fanelli is at the center of a sprawling corruption case alleging he took kickbacks from an alliance of pharmaceutical executives he nicknamed "The Pain League." (5/29)

After considering the testimony, the committee on Thursday recommended allowing a generic buprenorphine/naloxone tablet in addition to the Suboxone film to the preferred list of buprenorphine drugs, according to a photo of the panel's written recommendations that were presented at the meeting. The panel also recommended adding a statewide, streamlined pre-authorization process for prescribing an injectable form of extended-release buprenorphine known by the name Sublocade. (Innes, 5/28)