J&J is Getting Railroaded By Morons, And Why You Care

If you were paying close attention yesterday, you might have heard that some inbred robed fuckwit (and his mental incapacity and jurisprudential shortcomings with that appellation should be considered an extremely light sentence) yesterday awarded plaintiffs against Johnson & Johnson some $572M in damages (out of the $17Billion they asked for), due to opiate overdose deaths in the state of OK.

TL;DR:
This is childish magical thinking and judicial bullshit that should get the judge impeached, disbarred, and stoned at the city gates immediately. Then they should go after his family, the plaintiffs, and plaintiff's shyster lawyers. And then their families.

And OK's state Attorney General and his combined staff of dipshits (who pushed this nonsense) should be lynched, and dragged naked by the heels behind horses over rocks, metal shards, and broken glass for about 200 miles. Then they should turn the horses around, and return those AG @$$holes to the point of origin the same way. After that, and only after that, I'm okay with a full pardon of whatever meatsacks remain.

If you live in OK, walk tall. You've officially surpassed CA and NFY for actual jackassery, by several orders of magnitude, as of right now. Which is saying something. They've really raised the fucktard bar with this one to heights normally only attainable with orbital rocketry.

The next 5000 attempts at this sort of horsesh*t should lead to mass roundups, and conga lines to the gas chambers. For the same group of idiots.

In detail, from Fox Business News on Yahoo:

An Oklahoma judge found Johnson & Johnson and Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies liable for stoking the opioid crisis in the state and said the company must pay $572 million, far less the $17 billion that the state was seeking.

Judge Thad Balkman, of Cleveland County District Court in Norman, Oklahoma, is the first judge to rule in the opioid cases brought to trial by thousands of state and local governments against opioid manufacturers and distributors. 

His precedent-setting ruling was being closely watched as 2,000 other pending suits await to be heard before a federal judge in Ohio in October. 

J&J said it plans to appeal Balkman's ruling and that the decision was "flawed."
“Janssen did not cause the opioid crisis in Oklahoma, and neither the facts nor the law support this outcome,” said Michael Ullmann, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, Johnson & Johnson. 

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter brought the case to trial for seven weeks, arguing the pharmaceutical company executed an intensive marketing campaign that overwhelmed the market and mislead consumers about the addictive risks of the drug.
Hunter seeks $17 billion to cover all costs related to the state addressing the epidemic for the next 30 years, including treatment and prevention programs. 

Oklahoma lawyers dubbed J&J an opioid “kingpin” and alluded to its marketing tactics as a public health nuisance, under law. However, J&J absolves itself of any misconduct and presented research that said its painkillers, Duragesic and Nucynta, comprised a fraction of opioids prescribed in the state. 

Oklahoma escalated the trial after resolving claims against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP in March for $270 million and against Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd in May for $85 million, with only J&J remaining as a defendant.

So, in short, OK  went looking for someone wholly uninvolved, with deep pockets.
And found a judge with an IQ on a par with potted plants (but let's be fair, judges come from lawyers, and the morons don't fall far from the tree there), who looked at the contrary facts and legal doctrine, and decided none of that mattered, then spun his Magic 8-Ball and concluded half a billion dollars of shakedown cash sounded like a good round number.

So first, a little background.

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 Janssen-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.

(We report anecdotally the dumbass we saw in the ER once for possible stroke, upon whom while changing into a gown we found twenty or so of his daily pain patches, each of which are supposed to be removed before putting the new one on the next day. He was wobbly, and seemed impaired/intoxicated, but was alert and with stable vital signs, and once we removed his old patches, his symptoms disappeared in about 15 minutes, and he was released home with no further intervention than a headslap and a serious Dumbass Education Lecture.) In short, Rx fentanyl is responsible for probably roughly zero overdose deaths ever, inclusive, since it was invented. Unless you tried to eat the box, whole, and choked. You'd have to be drinking the stuff in gallon jugs. It's potent but short-acting, and we routinely deliver IV doses 20x the strength of Duragesic patches for simple broken bones, and it wears off in less than an hour, providing nothing but relief of moderate to severe pain with minimal side effects. That's WHY it's used.

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.

Why you give a fuck:

This case is the equivalent of a judge finding Oneida culpable for forks causing obesity.
It's finding Ticonderoga pencils responsible for causing mistakes on SATs.
And if I haven't made the point blisteringly clear yet,
It's finding Colt, Winchester, Remington, and Ruger guilty for murders and robberies.

It throws all moral agency and legal culpability since Hammurabi on its head, and undoes civilization itself with a penstroke. And Judge Fucktard thought (and I use that term loosely) that was okay.

His law school should revoke his degree tomorrow, and failing that, treating it like Carthage after the Third Punic War should be a baseline recompense for them, too.

If this sort of illegal horseshit is allowed to stand, it's the end of everything since fire and the wheel. I am not exaggerating.

It will start with J&J ceasing all opiate sales to Oklahoma, in perpetuity.
(Hint: they should institute that policy tomorrow. Then refer the howling from hundreds of thousands of agonized senior citizens to Judge Fucktard, and post his home phone number and that of the OK AG on the J&J website for complaints.)
Then every other drug company should follow suit, and will.

It will end with nobody producing anything anywhere, because someone might misuse it, and then sue the guy who made a legal product, just because they have money.

The only difference between this verdict and armed robbery, is that the jackass Judge Fucktard wasn't (as far as we know) wearing a ski mask and doing it with a pistol when he issued his retarded ruling. Otherwise, the difference between this and actual armed robbery is only that.

Judge Fucktard should literally be stripped of office, prosecuted for criminal fuckwittery of a civilizational level, and then taken out back of the courthouse and shot.

And the mentally retarded AG of OKiehoma and all his little fuckwit minions in that office, down to secretarial and janitorial staff, should be next to him, sharing the same fate.
Pour encourger les autres, dulce et decorum est.
Idiot AG Hunter has just highlighted that he needs to be kicked right the fuck out of office, and that the AG is an office the people of OK can do without, until further notice.

And failing this case getting reversed at some level, if and when jurisprudential sanity kicks in, I hope that's exactly what happens to them all.

When you out-Okie entire generations of all Sooner stupidity in one fell swoop, it should leave a mark, and serve as a cautionary tale told around campfire for centuries. If it unleashes pitchfork- and torch-wielding mobs hunting down lawyers for sport from coast to coast, it probably would not go too far, and would be instead a very good start.