A data expert testifying at a landmark opioid trial in West Virginia on Tuesday said that the potency of prescription drugs sent to local communities had increased over time, but the three large drug distributors being sued tried to discredit his analysis.
Cabell County and the city of Huntington say that AmerisourceBergen Drug Co, Cardinal Health Inc and McKesson Corp created a “public nuisance” by flooding their areas with prescription pain pills, and ignored the signs that the community was being ravaged by addiction.
While data consultant Craig McCann of Washington, focused his testimony on Monday on how many doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone were shipped to the area overall, the Herald Dispatch reported that on Tuesday he zeroed in on specific pharmacies.
He compared the number of opiates sent to single pharmacies and three family pharmacies — Fruth, CVS and Rite Aid — at four stores each.
Charts showed that these pharmacies received opiates at a disproportionate rate compared with the US average from 2006 to 2014.
The single pharmacies received the drugs at an even higher rate.
More powerful opioids were sent to Cabell County as time went on, McCann said.
Morphine milligram equivalent, a doctors’ tool to compare different drugs, was used to make the comparison. Oxycodone’s potency is about 1.5 times that of morphine, for example, but they are on the same level based on the morphine milligram equivalent.
AmerisourceBergen attorney Joe Mahady said that McCann was not an expert on medical needs or a doctor who could determine how many prescriptions should have been sent out across the country. McCann made his own calculations based on an equation he found online, not with information from the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) pill data, he said.
McCann said data show that AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health were responsible for about 98 percent of the 14.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone dosage units sent to four Fruth Pharmacies in Cabell County.
Four Rite Aid stores in the county received 8.8 million units, and while the company sent 63 percent of the doses itself, McKesson sent larger, stronger amounts of the drug.
Two-thirds of the shipments received by four CVS stores came from Cardinal Health, McCann said.
McKesson attorney Paul Schmidt and Mahady said that the plaintiffs were focusing on the highest numbers from the data that support their case and changing the scales on graphs to make them appear more impressive.
The distributors said that they asked the DEA for access to its pill data for more than a decade.
The companies were only granted access to data for the previous six months starting in 2018, Schmidt said.
The three distributors have continued to placed the blame on the DEA for its lack of communication and the pill quotas it set, as well as a rise in prescriptions written by doctors.
Similar lawsuits have resulted in multimillion-dollar settlements, but this is the first time the allegations have wound up at federal trial. The result could have huge effects on hundreds of similar lawsuits that have been filed across the country.
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