A pharmaceutical company has agreed to a $1.6 million settlement with Southern and Northern California prosecutors over allegations of deceptive advertising of opioid painkillers, Santa Clara officials announced this week.
The agreement between Teva Pharmaceuticals, the Santa Clara County Counsel’s Office and the Orange County District Attorney’s Office would head off a civil trial. Teva and four other companies were accused of engaging in deceptive marketing that helped spawn an addiction epidemic.
The agreement, which requires court approval, bars Teva from deceptive marketing. Santa Clara authorities said the settlement funds would go toward helping combat the impacts of the ongoing opioid epidemic in Orange and Santa Clara counties.
“Our residents have borne the costs of the deceptive marketing scheme conducted by opioid drug companies,” said Danny Chou, an assistant county counsel for Santa Clara County, in a statement. “These costs include not only the horrors of addiction for entire families and communities but also increased crime.”
Orange County District Attorney’s Office officials declined to comment until the settlement is finalized.
Teva officials could not be reached for comment. The company has “expressly denied any wrongdoing,” Santa Clara officials noted.
Attorneys with the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and the Santa Clara County Counsel’s Office allege that a joint investigation turned up a “decades-long scheme by the largest manufacturers of prescription opioid painkillers” to downplay the risks of their drugs while exaggerating the benefits.
The lawsuit alleges that marketing campaigns by Teva – as well as Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Actavis – helped transform prescription opioids from a niche market geared toward short-term use by cancer patients into a multi-billion-dollar industry in which the highly addictive drugs were used to treat patients with chronic pain.
While the settlement would end Teva’s role in the lawsuit, the charges against Purdue, Endo Health Solutions, Janssen and Actavis remain.
