(CNN Business)Oklahoma Supreme Court justices have reversed a district court decision that ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay hundreds of millions to the state for its role in the opioid crisis.
In the justices’ decision filed Tuesday, they wrote that the district court “erred” by holding Johnson & Johnson liable under the state’s public nuisance statute for its opioid prescription marketing campaign. “We hold that the district court’s expansion of public nuisance law went too far. Oklahoma public nuisance law does not extend to the manufacturing, marketing, and selling of prescription opioids,” Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice James Winchester wrote in his opinion.
The opinion states that the manufacture and distribution of products “rarely causes a violation of a public right” and that a manufacturer generally does not have control over a product once its sold, and that if the public nuisance law were allowed to be used to hold a company liable for its products “a manufacturer could be held perpetually liable.”
“In reaching this decision, we do not minimize the severity of the harm that thousands of Oklahoma citizens have suffered because of opioids,” the opinion states. “However grave the problem of opioid addiction is in Oklahoma, public nuisance law does not provide a remedy for this harm.”Read MoreA spokesman for Johnson & Johnson praised the decision Tuesday and said that none of the $465 million that the company had been told to give to the state has been given to communities to abate the overdose crisis.
“Today the Oklahoma State Supreme Court appropriately and categorically rejected the misguided and unprecedented expansion of the public nuisance law as a means to regulate the manufacture, marketing, and sale of products, including the Company’s prescription opioid medications,” Johnson & Johnson spokesman Jake Sargent wrote in a statement.CNN has reached out to the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office for comment.
Source: edition.cnn.com
