Big pharma is facing a major test in a small courthouse 20 miles south of here: the first trial at which a jury could decide whether drug companies bear responsibility for the nation's opioid crisis. Thousands of cities, counties, Native American tribes, and others have filed lawsuits up and down the opioid supply chain, alleging various claims of culpability for the crisis that began with widespread abuse of powerful painkillers. Most of the cases have been consolidated in a major federal action in Cleveland. But as that case lags, smaller state cases like the one here in Oklahoma are quickly moving to hold companies to account, creating an early test of how costly the opioid crisis might be for the pharmaceutical companies that made billions of dollars off the drugs.
Oklahoma's case is scheduled to begin May 28 at a state courthouse in Norman. Judge Thad Balkman has repeatedly refused to delay the trial and has agreed to have it televised live every day, raising the prospect of nationwide coverage of grieving families and embarrassing internal company emails. Nearly 800 Oklahomans died of drug overdoses in 2017, about half of them from opioids. "What happens there is going to set the standard for what happens after it," said Abbe Gluck, a Yale Law School professor, who predicted that the outcome in Oklahoma could provide leverage to the victor in the larger federal case to follow.
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