CHARLESTON – A historian of opioid use and drug policy testified, in a federal trial against three major opioid distributors Wednesday, about three principal opioid epidemics that preceded the ongoing crisis.
The City of Huntington and Cabell County sued the “Big Three” drug distributors – McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health – in 2017 over their role in the overdose crisis, after more than 80 million doses of the drugs were sent to the area in an eight-year period.
Wednesday is the third day in the bench trial at the Charleston federal courthouse.
Farrell
| farrell.law
Under questioning from plaintiffs' lawyer Paul Farrell Jr., David Courtwright, who wrote "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business," said the first epidemic, in the late 1900s, came from widespread medicinal use of opioids.