Big Pharma Held Responsible for Opioid Deaths . . . but Now What?

This week’s story update on the Election Central Web details the political fight occurring about how to properly spend the legal payouts related to the opioid crisis.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, so far during the opioid epidemic, roughly 218,000 Americans have been killed by overdoses tied to prescription pain pills. To put that number in perspective, it’s about two and a half times as many Americans as were killed in the Vietnam War, and 31 times as many as were killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. Unlike with major wars, the enemy, in this case, is complicated and difficult to identify.

But bearing much of the responsibility are large pharmaceutical companies, who aggressively pushed their addictive pain medications on unsuspecting patients. Thousands of governments–federal, state, and local–have all filed lawsuits against these drug companies. But this has led to another complicated problem: what to do with the large payouts resulting from these lawsuits. Here, Election Central takes a closer look.

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