ECM reports key information attributed to County Attorney Palumbo:
The Anoka County lawsuit will target opioid manufacturers, not distributors, according to Palumbo.
He expects the complaint to be filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis in the next few weeks, Palumbo said.
Then the case will be transferred to the northern federal district of Ohio, where all lawsuits nationwide involving opioid manufacturers are being consolidated, but any trial will take place in Minneapolis, Palumbo said.
The prescription opioid manufacturers named in the letter of engagement are Purdue Pharma L.P., Purdue Pharma Inc., The Purdue Frederick Company Inc., Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc., Cephalon Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., Endo Health Solutions Inc. and Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc.
“A lot of thought went into this as well as due diligence before moving forward,” said Anoka County Board Chairperson Rhonda Sivarajah.
[..] Under the terms of the engagement letter, there is no fee for services unless “a monetary recovery obtained by counsel in favor of the county, whether by suit, settlement or otherwise.”
In the event of a successful lawsuit, the law firms would receive a gross fee of 25 percent of the monetary recovery divided among them as set out in the engagement letter.
“The county will not be spending any tax dollars on this lawsuit and only a limited amount of staff time will be involved,” said Commissioner Scott Schulte. [...]
Counties and cities across the country have been filing lawsuits against prescription opioid manufacturers and distributors, and in late November, a group of Minnesota counties, including Ramsey, Washington, Olmsted, Dakota, Carver and Mower counties, announced they had hired a Minneapolis-based law firm for a legal action targeting the companies’ alleged widespread and deceptive marketing campaign.
If reading the report correctly, it appears mega-drug distributor McKesson is not, at least initially, to be named a defendant; despite general reporting about the gigantic firm and the crisis.
This websearch.
____________UPDATE_____________
And a segue, from Anoka County suing opioid manufacturers, to federal happenings involving the elephant in the room. The mega-distributor who was allowed to cut a questionable deal. And a JBS III dimension at play.
For absolute clarity about JBS III (Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III, the Pence-Trump team's Attorney General) it appears decision-making by upper tier fed lawyers sold out cheaply on alleged McKesson opiod fault.
With that as background, it can be alleged that JBS III is using marijuana as a smoke screen to cover his culpable tracks in bending the Justice Department over forward for the benefit of the McKesson money machine and its shareholding 1%'ers; counter to what DEA wanted and expected prior to a "settlement" which the already cited December 17, 2017, WaPo item characterizes as disturbing:
The DEA team — nine field divisions working with 12 U.S. attorney’s offices across 11 states — wanted to revoke registrations to distribute controlled substances at some of McKesson’s 30 drug warehouses. Schiller and members of his team wanted to fine the company more than $1 billion. More than anything else, they wanted to bring the first-ever criminal case against a drug distribution company, maybe even walk an executive in handcuffs out of McKesson’s towering San Francisco headquarters to send a message to the rest of the industry.
“This is the best case we’ve ever had against a major distributor in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration,” said [David] Schiller, who recently retired as assistant special agent in charge of DEA’s Denver field division after a 30-year career with the agency. “I said, ‘How do we not go after the number one organization?’ ”
But it didn’t work out that way.
Instead, top attorneys at the DEA and the Justice Department struck a deal earlier this year with the corporation and its powerful lawyers, an agreement that was far more lenient than the field division wanted, according to interviews and internal government documents. Although the agents and investigators said they had plenty of evidence and wanted criminal charges, they were unable to convince the U.S. attorney in Denver that they had enough to bring a case.
Discussions about charges never became part of the negotiations between the government lawyers in Washington and the company.
“It was insulting,” Schiller said. “Morale has been broken because of it.”
The result illustrates the long-standing conflict between drug investigators, who have taken an aggressive approach to a prescription opioid epidemic that killed nearly 200,000 people between 2000 and 2016, and the government attorneys who handle those cases at the DEA and the Justice Department.
None of McKesson’s warehouses would lose their DEA registrations. The company, a second-time offender, had promised in 2008 to be more diligent about the diversion of its pills to the street. It ultimately agreed to temporarily suspend controlled substance shipments at four distribution centers and pay a $150 million fine.
[...] While the fine set a record for drug distributors, it is only about $50 million more than the compensation last year for McKesson board chairman and chief executive John H. Hammergren, the nation’s third-highest-paid chief executive. McKesson has 76,000 employees and revenue of almost $200 billion a year, about the same as ExxonMobil.
The Justice Department declined repeated requests for comment.
[italics AND red text emphasis added]
"Long standing" above is vague as to how far back that means. However, 2000 to 2016 bridges the second Bush years and Obama's two terms.
NEXT: Read this further item, WaPo again; source of the below screen capture and excerpting, and then you decide whether your federal trustees of the public's health did wrong by the citizenry. It's the Pence crony net again in action; and if there is an impeachment Pence stands to benefit most in moving from shadow-puppeteer into the driver's seat. Sleaze? You decide.
In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets.
By then, the opioid war had claimed 200,000 lives, more than three times the number of U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam War. Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight.
A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.
The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against drug distribution companies that were supplying corrupt doctors and pharmacists who peddled narcotics to the black market. The industry worked behind the scenes with lobbyists and key members of Congress, pouring more than a million dollars into their election campaigns.
The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar. Marino spent years trying to move the law through Congress. It passed after Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) negotiated a final version with the DEA.
So, perps named. That too-frequently-reelected Utah guy in Senate of the US of A, another perp in the House. Prospering perps.
WaPo continued:
Political action committees representing the industry contributed at least $1.5 million to the 23 lawmakers who sponsored or co-sponsored four versions of the bill, including nearly $100,000 to Marino and $177,000 to Hatch. Overall, the drug industry spent $102 million lobbying Congress on the bill and other legislation between 2014 and 2016, according to lobbying reports.
[...] Besides the sponsors and co-sponsors of the bill, few lawmakers knew the true impact the law would have. It sailed through Congress and was passed by unanimous consent, a parliamentary procedure reserved for bills considered to be noncontroversial. The White House was equally unaware of the bill’s import when President Barack Obama signed it into law, according to interviews with former senior administration officials.
Top officials at the White House and the Justice Department have declined to discuss how the bill came to pass.
Silence is golden, they say. More WaPo - we did not know, asserted:
Michael Botticelli, who led the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy at the time, said neither Justice nor the DEA objected to the bill, removing a major obstacle to the president’s approval.
“We deferred to DEA, as is common practice,” he said.
[...] The bill also was reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“Neither the DEA nor the Justice Department informed OMB about the policy change in the bill,” a former senior OMB official with knowledge of the issue said recently. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal White House deliberations.
The DEA’s top official at the time, acting administrator Chuck Rosenberg, declined repeated requests for interviews.
Loretta E. Lynch, who was attorney general at the time, declined a recent interview request.
Obama also declined to discuss the law. His spokeswoman, Katie Hill, referred reporters to Botticelli’s statement.
The DEA and Justice Department have denied or delayed more than a dozen requests filed by The Post and “60 Minutes” under the Freedom of Information Act for public records that might shed additional light on the matter. Some of those requests have been pending for nearly 18 months. The Post is now suing the Justice Department in federal court for some of those records.
[links in original omitted] And there is more. Burglers in your home in the night arguably show less stealth, nor maintain such silence when self interest says to. Fairness requires it be said, the bill in question was passed during the Obama tenure; so does that let JBS III off the hook?
Hatch was the key perp.
Text online here. Lovers of euphemism should note,
Short title. This Act may be cited as the "Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016".
Few signed on as cosponsors; those doing so may be scorned or praised; depending on how the thing is viewed. The bill went to the Senate Judiciary Committee [this link - caution, whether this is the committee membership presently, or relating back to the 114th Congress is not clear; nor was it researched in posting this item]. Given the caveat, pinning down what role then-Senator JBS III played was not done, so cut him some slack.
That said, JBS III surely is not opining all over DC and the remainder of the nation how opiate deaths are in any way whatsoever a bother to him. He's got weed on his mind, and seemingly is single-minded, to a fault. It's the old diversionary thing; don't look here, look there, scorn them and that; etc. It all fits in with the "Short Title" of that McKesson love-in bill, a title diversionary to a fault.
BOTTOM LINE: This Act of Law of the US of A stands in stark contrast to the persecution of weed, where nobody in the history of that medicine's use over millennia has died from using it. But on the bright side -
Now that weed is a big billion buck industry in states where legalized, it seems only a matter of time before legislatures nationwide salivate over the taxation potential, and prohibition is ended, not with a bang, but with cheering and money being made by eterprising folks with sound connections, not you, nor I.
.......................................
The swamp part I understand. It's the draining part I am unable to see in any focus whatsoever.
____________FURTHER UPDATE______________
WaPo again. A report of finalizing the first of several anticipated JBS III DOJ opiate-related settlement actions; involving an opiate manufacturer that had claimed that once product went to distributors they were no longer part of the trail. The JBS III DOJ and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals negotiated a token fine and a mandate of better record keeping, nobody charged with criminality.
No punishment fitting the crime, or arguably so. If you read the item, see what you think.
__________FURTHER UPDATE___________
Further rock lifting: Jefferson BS III appears to not be a man to waste time once given opportunity. Nominated but not given final Senate confirmation by the Senate until Feb. 8, 2017; the Sessions DOJ swept its biggest opioid cave-in into existence Jan. 17, 2017.
DOJ opines online, Jan 17.
McKesson opines online, Jan. 17.
The government has reached nearly a dozen such settlements with wholesale distributors of opioids, including one that brought a record $150 million fine against McKesson Corp. Other large settlements have been reached with major retail drug chains.
The Mallinckrodt Pharm. settlement, if a first, appears to be shifting gears from wholesale distributors off the hook, to manufacturers off the hook, with distributors absolved first because they stand one step closer to street dealer abuses than do the manufacturers.
So JBS III is letting all the opiate perps skate, while issuing smoke signals about weed being illegal as the federal law of the land. Stomping a safe and non-lethal medicine with spurs on, while low profile blind-eye kid glove culpability waivers are being given drug-death overlords who lobby big time and schmooze the upper tier "watchdogs." Another snapshot of how Washington DC and its vermin operate.
Jefferson BS III is an item. A tool. A disgrace.
____________FURTHER UPDATE_____________
Ostensibly to send a message, one bad MD actor in New Jersey has been "tarred and feathered" by law enforcement, with extenuating circumstances beyond profiteering from the opiate crisis; as per our McKesson crowds' behavior. Gee. What is the sound of one hand clapping?
____________FURTHER UPDATE____________
Back to the opening of the post, FOX9 online about Anoka County suing.
__________FURTHER UPDATE____________
Arguably cumulative after a point has been made, The Hill, this link. Also, even South Dakota has its share of the problem, the State's AG posting of it along with charts reaching nationwide and not limited to the single State.