Opioids: Another "Free Money" Game for States?

The "Free Money!!!" lawsuit-game is back!!  Update:  This case--if upheld--has serious consequences for gun manufacturers.  Keep reading.....

This week, an Oklahoma judge ruled that Johnson & Johnson should pay $572 million to “abate” a “public nuisance” the company created in that state by minimizing the hazards and overselling the benefits of prescription opioids....

(Didja ever notice that those $$$Umpty-Millions never seem to get into the hands of the taxpayers of the States?)

Anyhow.

...A 2018 analysis of medical ­records found evidence of “opioid misuse” in 1% of patients who took pain pills after surgery. While studies find that misuse is more common among chronic pain patients, a 2016 New England Journal of Medicine article concluded that “rates of carefully diagnosed addiction” average less than 8%.

That study, which was co-authored by Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, noted that “addiction occurs in only a small percentage of persons who are exposed to opioids — even among those with preexisting vulnerabilities.”...

Never mind the facts.  Just stuff that money into the pie-hole of Gummint, where it will undoubtedly do the most good.

Sure.

The Raconteur, who works in emergency medicine, has a few more observations which SHOULD have been considered by the judge (read this link for more colorful language....)

...1) Opiate deaths are overwhelmingly caused by heroin and carfentanil (street-cooked synthetic fentanyl, i.e. acetyl fentanyl), - typically the two in combination courtesy of street level pharmaceutical distributors - not by prescription opiates of any kind. I'd spitball it's at a ratio of about 99 to 1, but I may be low-balling the actual numbers for the true percentage of overdoses by street opiates (i.e. it may be 999 to 1 or 9999 to 1).
2) The LD50 of RX-grade fentanyl being unknown, using the [J&J]-made Durgesic patches above would require you to slap eighty of them on full-strength, just to get to the highest dosage of Rx tablet. And even then, that still wouldn't kill you....

Here's the part which has to do with gun manufacturers (and auto manufacturers, too):

3) I don't care if J&J blanketed the airwaves and beamed their ads into your head from space, and gave away multiple truckloads of free samples to every MD in the Okie State, and sold every RX pill they ever got: They are marketing a legal product for legal usage, and the actions of others are not their fault, in reality, or morally, ethically, nor legally, since ever.

Blaming the makers of a legal product, in an excruciatingly highly-regulated trade, for the misdeeds of others using completely different items, whose only similarity is a chemical class, is simply utter horseshit. Such jurisprudence is the hallmark of mental retardation and absolute professional incapacity.

Hmmmmm.