North Wales' Teva Pharmaceuticals Sued Over Opioid Epidemic

NORTH WALES, PA — A North Wales company is among several area drug manufacturers being sued by the city of Philadelphia for "deceptive marketing" practices which the suit alleges have contributed to the ongoing opioid epidemic.

Teva Pharmaceuticals, whose North American headquarters is based in North Wales, is named in the suit along with five others.

"The epidemic currently plaguing the City has exacted a grim toll on Philadelphia residents and their families," Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement on the suit. "And the cause can be directly linked to the methods used by manufacturers to market and sell their products to doctors and the public. Those tactics have to end."

The suit also is seeking to force the companies to pay for the costs of treatment of residents suffering from opioid addiction and opioid use disorder, and to recover costs the city itself has incurred responding to the epidemic.

Those costs include funding for first-responders and public health, human services programs that treat addicted residents, increased resources to fund the city's criminal justice and prison systems, and expenditures to many other city departments affected by the epidemic.

Specific drugs mentioned in the suit include fentanyl, oxycodone, morphine, and tramadol.

The entire suit is available to review online here.

The Philadelphia Health Department estimates that one in three adults in Philadelphia has received a prescription for opioids in the past 12 months and one in seven – or some 168,000 – is currently taking these dangerous drugs.

Allergan/Actavis in Parsippany, New Jersey, Endo in Malvern, Janssen in Titsuville, New Jersey, Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Purdue in Stamford, Connecticut are named in the suit as well.

With reporting from Patch correspondent Max Bennett

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