Richard M. Heimann

LSAN FRANCISCO - Early last month, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer issued a 112-page order detailing why Walgreens Co. is liable for facilitating the opioid crisis in San Francisco. By the time Breyer made his ruling, several other defendants had settled out, leaving only Walgreens.

LHeimann was the plaintiffs' co-lead trial counsel in charge of Walgreens.

L"My team and I were responsible for putting together the strategy, the evidence and the presentation of the evidence at trial against Walgreens," he said. San Francisco v. Purdue Pharma LP, 3:18-cv-07591 (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 18, 2018).

LBreyer's decision came in one of the bellwether trials spun out of the opioids multidistrict litigation in Cleveland. In the litigation, the manufacturers are essentially accused of committing fraud by misrepresenting the drugs' effectiveness and addictiveness. Heimann said. Distributors are accused of failing to meet their legal obligations by selling large quantities that were likely to be diverted to the illicit market.

L"The case against Walgreens is what's called the dispensing case," he said. It claims that the company and its pharmacists failed to follow state and federal laws requiring them to dispense opioid prescriptions only for legitimate medical purposes. "What we did was we presented in a variety of different ways the evidence that supported the contention that Walgreens was improperly dispensing opioid prescriptions in San Francisco."

LPharmacists should have noticed any of a dozen or more "red flags" that prescriptions were not medically legitimate, he and his team argued. For instance, if someone has traveled from the suburbs to a downtown pharmacy to fill an opioid prescription, the pharmacist should find out why, he said. Much of the two-month trial in front of Breyer examined how Walgreens responded to red flags.

LHeimann said the next step in the case will be difficult. "One of our tasks is to determine what is a reasonable and responsible abatement plan, and the cost associated with it, to ask the court to order."

LHe added: "The ultimate beneficiaries, one would hope, of this litigation are the addicted people of San Francisco, who are going to get a program funded that will enable them to much more readily get treatment and, one hopes, get off opioids going forward."