The Oklahoma supreme court on Tuesday threw out a $465 million ruling against Johnson and Johnson for its role in the state’s opioid addiction crisis, finding that the lower court which had handed down that ruling had wrongly interpreted state law.
The court found that the state’s public nuisance law, at the heart of some 3,000 lawsuits against drugmakers, was misunderstood in the initial ruling, according to an opinion written by Justice James R. Winchester.
“The court has allowed public nuisance claims to address discrete, localized problems, not policy problems,” he wrote. “J&J had no control of its products through the multiple levels of distribution, including after it sold the opioids to distributors and wholesalers, which were then disbursed to pharmacies, hospitals, and physicians’ offices, and then prescribed by doctors to patients.”