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The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned a $465 million opioid ruling against drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, finding that a lower court wrongly interpreted the state’s public nuisance law in the first case of its kind in the U.S. to go to trial. The ruling was the second blow this month to a government case that used a similar approach to try to hold drugmakers responsible for the national epidemic of opioid abuse. Public nuisance claims are at the heart of some 3,000 lawsuits brought by state and local governments against drugmakers, distribution companies and pharmacies, but it’s not clear that the legal theory is in trouble with so many more cases queued up to test it. (Miller, 11/9)

“In reaching this decision, we do not minimize the severity of the harm that thousands of Oklahoma citizens have suffered because of opioids,” the Oklahoma Supreme Court judges wrote in their ruling. “However grave the problem of opioid addiction is in Oklahoma, public nuisance law does not provide a remedy for this harm.” The one dissenting judge, James E. Edmondson, said he disagreed with the ruling against J&J but thought the decision should be remanded to the lower court. Johnson & Johnson praised the ruling Tuesday. (Kornfield and Bernstein, 11/9)

The lawsuit featured the first trial in the nation that sought to hold the pharmaceutical industry accountable for widespread opioid addiction and overdoses. A state court judge found Johnson & Johnson created misleading and dangerous marketing campaigns for drugs and opioids that lacked context and exaggerated opioids’ safety and efficacy as pain treatments. The drugmaker was ordered in 2019 to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to help address the damage caused. The dollar amount—initially $572 million but later reduced to $465 million—represented an estimated year’s worth of treatment and programs. (Calfas, 11/9)

Fatal opioid overdoses nearly doubled in recent years among Massachusetts workers, with the construction, farming and fishing industries among the hardest hit sectors, according to an updated study from the state Department of Public Health released Monday. The new state report, which builds on a prior study covering 2011-2015, shows the rate of opioid-related overdose deaths among workers across all industries increased from 25 deaths per 100,000 workers from 2011-2015 to 46 in 2016-2017. (11/8)

It’s hard to be sure what Alissa Saunders thought she was taking the night she died of a drug overdose — a ground-up Percocet, maybe, or a pulverized bar of Xanax. One thing seems clear enough, though: She didn’t know it was fentanyl. Saunders, a 22-year-old certified nursing assistant who loved to camp, fish and hang out with her family, was found unresponsive last March in the New Lenox townhouse she shared with a roommate, a straw flecked with powdered residue on the nightstand beside her. (Keilman, 11/9)