May 21, 2018 · In the 1990s, as Mississippi's attorney general, Mike Moore launched a lawsuit against 13 tobacco companies that eventually resulted in a $246 billion, 50-state settlement.
Dec 17, 2018 · Attorney General Mike DeWine: They flooded the State of Ohio with these opioid pills that they knew would kill people. ... You made money off of BP spill. Mike Moore: I made some money on helping ...
Sep 25, 2019 · “They should have put 100 million pills out in America, and they put several billions of pills into America,” Moore said. “But for the pill spill, we wouldn’t have this opioid epidemic.” Similarly, BP could have taken any number of additional safety and maintenance steps to prevent or mitigate the oil spill, Moore said.
Jul 02, 2019 · “Ohio is losing $4 billion or $5 billion a year from the opioid epidemic,” Moore explains. “And they’re losing 5,000 or 6,000 people a year from overdose deaths. So when a jury hears the evidence in this case, they’re not gonna award just a couple hundred million dollars. It may be $100 billion.
It's also simple why Moore is going after the biggest players in drug distribution: because they have much deeper pockets than the manufacturers. Purdue Pharma, for example, had less than $2 billion in revenue last year. Distributor McKesson, by contrast, had $208 billion in revenue.
As Mississippi's attorney general, he engineered the historic 1998 settlement under which Big Tobacco paid billions to address smoking-related health issues. In 2015, he convinced BP to settle multibillion-dollar lawsuits over its huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Mike Moore: Well, you know-- they can be as profitable as they want to. But-- Ohio is losing $4 billion or $5 billion a year from the opioid epidemic. And they're losing 5,000 or 6,000 people a year from overdose deaths.
Opioid Crisis: The lawsuits that could bankrupt manufacturers and distributors. The attorney behind a multibillion-dollar tobacco settlement in 1998 has turned his attention to the opioid epidemic. And he wants drug companies to pay. 2018 Dec 16.
And the court of public opinion is sometime the most powerful court. 60 Minutes played an important and controversial role in the public case against Big Tobacco. Moore was interviewed for a segment that at first, CBS corporate lawyers refused to allow on the air.
Purdue Pharma declined our request for an interview, but said in a statement that when the FDA approved oxycontin in 1995 it authorized the company to state on the label that "addiction to opioids legitimately used is very rare.".
The unlikely "command center" for Moore's legal war is the sleepy town of Grayton Beach on Florida's panhandle. Mike Moore: You know, in a place like this, you're not limited with a bunch of tall buildings, and coats and ties, and that kinda thing. You can think outside the box a little bit. So.
The April 20, 2010, explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig led to the largest marine oil spill in history. The rig sent as much as 60,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico for weeks. Ultimately, BP put $20 billion into a compensation fund for an estimated 100,000 affected individuals and businesses.
The biggest lesson learned from the BP case could be a way to calculate payouts that saves court time, Rice said. “In BP, we cut through potentially years of litigation by establishing models to show the damage.”
Purdue has already proposed paying a $10 billion settlement to limit its liability going forward as part of a bankruptcy filing.
Many of the defendants in the opioids case argue they have less or no liability compared to other parties, Burg said.