It’s no secret that the opioid epidemic has been ravaging the country, and the Cherokee Nation wants to do something about that.
Its attorneys recently filed a lawsuit in the District Court of the Cherokee Nation against the U.S.’s top drug distributors and pharmacies, accusing them of gross negligence, civil conspiracy, and unjust enrichment—in other words, they say the drug makers have profited at the expense of the Cherokee Nation, and they aren’t doing anything to stop tribal lands from being “flooded” with opioids.
“Defendants turned a blind eye to the problem of opioid diversion and profited from the sale of prescription opioids to the citizens of the Cherokee Nation in quantities that far exceed the number of prescriptions that could reasonably have been used for legitimate medical purposes,” the suit alleges, “despite having notice or actual knowledge of widespread opiate diversion from prescribing records, pharmacy orders, field reports, and sales representatives.”
The lawsuit says that nearly 845 million milligrams of opioids were distributed to the 14 counties that comprise the Cherokee Nation. That’s enough to provide every man, woman, and child on the reservation with 955 5-milligram pills. Five milligrams is the most common dose of opioid medications.
“While the opioid industry has made billions, the Cherokee Nation has been ravaged by the opioid crisis,” Cherokee Nation Chief Bill John Baker said in a press release. “It is unconscionable to pump these massive quantities of dangerous drugs into our community.”
“We have a generation of children who are living in chaos,” said Nikki Baker-Limore, Executive Director of Child Welfare for the Cherokee Nation. “The children are our tribe’s future, and without them, we can’t go on.”
Cherokee Nation lawyers hoped that filing in tribal court would get them quicker access to internal corporate records showing that the defendants had knowledge of the suspiciously large flow of opioid pills into Indian country.
The pharmaceutical companies and drugstore retailers named in the lawsuit want to have the case moved to federal court, which the Cherokee Nation says would violate federal law that recognizes its sovereign status on reservation land.
The defendants, including the McKesson Corporation, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS, Walmart, and Walgreen’s, seek a declaratory judgment that the tribal court lacks jurisdiction because none of the defendants named in the tribal court filing are tribal members and the alleged conduct didn’t happen in Indian country.
Defendant AmerisourceBergen said in a statement that it was reviewing the lawsuit. “The issue of opioid abuse is a complex one that spans the full healthcare spectrum, including manufacturers, wholesalers, insurers, prescribers, pharmacists, and regulatory and enforcement agencies. All of these entities must work together to ensure medicine is available, as appropriate and prescribed, to patients, while also limiting and preventing abuse.”
Cardinal Health released a statement that the company “is confident that the facts and the law are on our side, and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves against the plaintiff’s mischaracterization of those facts and misunderstanding of the law.”
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