No Just Cause: A Decades-Long Strategy of Deception and Secrecy that Enabled America's Deadly Opioid Crisis

This Essay examines the national epidemic of prescription opioid addiction and overdose deaths that began in the mid-1990s and continues to the present. Litigating from West Virginia—ground-zero of the opioid crisis—the authors draw from their experiences providing pro bono representation of a West Virginia newspaper and The Washington Post to successfully uncover long-buried facts. If revealed to the public, that hidden information could have stopped the epidemic in its tracks, saving millions of Americans from addiction and hundreds of thousands from cruel overdose deaths. The Essay highlights how political influence and industry capture hindered effective oversight of prescription opioid profiteers. The authors reveal the two-decade strategy of drug companies whose pernicious abuse of Civil Procedure Rule 26(c) protective orders and sealing of court records manipulated the courts and conned government regulators. That strategy effectively concealed the corrupt, unlawful corporate actions that created and fueled the opioid epidemic. Importantly, the Essay also identifies and documents the largely overlooked actions of judges, lawyers, federal and state law enforcement, and regulatory agencies that effectively prevented public disclosure of the intentional, unlawful and corrupt activities of prescription opioid manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and “pill mill” doctors. These prescription opioid supply chain actors lined their pockets with enormous profits while fully aware of the unfathomable number of addictive pills—one hundred and ten billion pills—one billion in West Virginia alone—that inundated communities throughout the nation from 2006 to 2014. Ultimately, the authors provide a critical examination of the systematic failures and corruption that enabled the epidemic and reveal the devastating costs of corporate greed and governmental failures and complicity.