‘Johnson & Johnson helped fuel this fire’ – now it’s out of the opioids business | Opioids crisis

Johnson & Johnson said it had already jumped. New York’s attorney general suggested the pharmaceutical giant was pushed.

Either way, the American drug maker is the first to formally agree to get out of the multibillion-dollar business of selling the powerful narcotic painkillers that drove the US opioid epidemic.

J&J made the deal, along with agreeing to pay a $230m settlement, to avoid the first jury trial of major pharmaceutical companies over the opioid crisis, which is scheduled to open in New York state on Tuesday.

The trial comes as the drug industry faces a reckoning for what its accusers describe as cynicism and greed in creating an epidemic of addiction to prescription painkillers and illicit opioids, such as heroin, that has killed more than 600,000 since 1999 and caused misery for millions more.

Ongoing trials in West Virginia and California have pressured J&J, other opioid makers, pharmaceutical chains and some of the largest US drug…

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