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A doctor who has spent decades advocating for an expanded use of powerful prescription painkillers is now working with state and local governments that are suing pharmaceutical companies for the opioid crisis.
Dr. Russell Portenoy, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is helping the complainants in exchange for withdrawing their applications. His cooperation was made public late last week in a lawsuit filed by a special magistrate who helps manage over 1,500 lawsuits against the drug industry, which are bundled in front of a federal judge in Cleveland.
The special master, David Cohen, said the government's plaintiffs had described Portenoy as "a paid salary for the manufacturer's defendants by promoting the use of prescription opioids while minimizing their risks" .
Cohen also found that Portenoy failed to disclose to drug manufacturers and distributors that it was cooperating with government complainants when they entered into this agreement in March 2018. As a result, governments will not be able to use his testimony in cases filed by Ohio. the counties of Cuyahoga and Summit to be judged in October.
A statement that Portenoy gave earlier this year for an opioid lawsuit in Oklahoma also can not be used in these early federal cases, but Cohen said Portenoy may be called to testify in subsequent trials.
Robert Josephson, a spokesman for the manufacturer of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, said in a statement that the sanction against the plaintiffs was appropriate. Hunter Shkolnik, a lawyer who handled the Portenoy case on behalf of the state and local governments in federal affairs, did not answer the call on Monday.
Opioid medications have long been used to relieve end-of-life and postoperative pain. But from the 1990s, a new generation of drugs was used to treat chronic pain.
Prosecutions by states and local governments across the country claim that the change has been a major factor in the national crisis of opioid dependence and overdose.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the clbad of drugs, including prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and illicit drugs such as fentanyl and heroin, has been implicated in a record of 48,000 deaths in the United States in 2017 – more than the number of deaths in road accidents.
Lawyers representing governments said that "opinion leaders" such as Portenoy were one of the main reasons for the change of philosophy in the area of prescription.
Portenoy published findings to support the increasing use of opioids in the fight against chronic pain as early as the 1980s. For a time, he was president of the American Pain Society, an organization strongly supported by drug manufacturers.
Portenoy and other doctors who advocated a more liberal use of opioids have been named as defendants in many cases brought by governments against the drug industry.
Portenoy also made a statement late last year, detailing how he would testify at the trial, document under seal by a federal court. Neither Portenoy nor his lawyers came back from the Associated Press on Monday.
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