Jury deliberations in Baltimore's opioid case against two drug distribution companies will stretch into next week.
Circuit Judge Lawrence P. Fletcher-Hill dismissed jurors for the weekend Friday afternoon, ordering they resume deliberations Tuesday morning.
The six-person jury considered the case for about six hours Friday following a trial that spanned more than six weeks, featuring days of testimony, hours of videotaped depositions and hundreds of documents.
Baltimore accuses the drug distributors of fueling the city's opioid epidemic by sending hundreds of millions of painkillers here from 2006 to 2019 with little regard for the havoc they allegedly knew the addictive pills could reach. The city's lawyers say the influx of pills hooked a new generation on opioids, people who went on to die at staggering rates when their prescriptions ran out and they turned to heroin and fentanyl, which is much more potent.
Lawyers from McKesson and AmerisourceBergen persistently downplayed the role of prescription painkillers in the opioid epidemic, saying instead that heroin and fentanyl were responsible for the addiction scourge. They blamed cartels, gangs and street crews for flooding city streets with illicit drugs.
The defense attorneys also said that doctors were responsible for increases in opioid shipments to Baltimore because the companies only shipped drugs to meet demand driven by prescriptions. They also said the companies only sold to pharmacies licensed by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the state of Maryland.
But city lawyers countered that the companies neglected their responsibilities under the federal Controlled Substances Act to catch and report suspicious orders of opioids. They said McKesson and AmerisourceBergen intentionally overlooked warning signs that the drugs they sold were ending up on the streets.
Jurors have to decide whether the opioid crisis in Baltimore is depriving residents of their rights to public health and safety. Then they have to determine whether McKesson and AmerisourceBergen's distribution of opioids was unreasonable and contributed to the public nuisance. They also have to determine if the companies' drugs ended up on the street.
Only if the jury decides that the companies are liable in the case can it move on to damages. The city is asking jurors to award $260 million.