Ten Chicago suburbs and a downstate town are suing a dozen drug companies and a trio of delicensed doctors that the towns say ran an opioid pill mill—causing devastation in their own communities.
It continues: “Defendants’ indifference has taken a dramatic toll on Plaintiffs’ communities. Drug abuse, addiction, overdose, and crime caused by Defendant’s illicit activities have imposed, and will continue to impose, tremendous social and economic costs on Plaintiffs. Plaintiffs have spent significant taxpayer money to combat opioid abuse and addiction, including substantial excess expenditures on law enforcement, criminal justice services, and emergency medical services, as well as significant costs to its employee health insurance program due to paying for opioids that should have never been prescribed.”
Both Madison and McMahon were paid lavishly for “speaking engagements” by Insys, a drug company that marketed fentanyl, a particularly potent opioid. Until 2016, the lawsuit alleges, Madison was Insys’s top prescribing doctor, accounting for 58 percent of Illinois’s fentanyl prescriptions, the suit claims. (Insys CEO John Kapoor is now under federal criminal indictment, accused of bribing doctors for prescribing fentanyl.)
