Louisiana leads fight for America’s opioid babies

Earlier this year, Louisiana attorneys raised the need to seek help for the great number of babies, many born right here in our state, suffering from opioid withdrawal, a symptom called Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome or NAS. It is estimated that an opioid-addicted baby is born in the United States every 25 to 15 minutes.

As documented in a Vice News report that aired on HBO this summer called the “Opioid Generation,” these babies are born to mothers who became addicted to the painkillers that Big Pharma and their distributors dumped on struggling communities in New Orleans, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and elsewhere, aided by deceptive marketing and few controls.

Finally, an issue that was raised first here in our state is getting a human face because this is a problem too few Americans know about or can easily comprehend. A generation of children is now before us which will go through life forever facing the impacts of drug addiction that started in the womb.

The best projections are that around 40,000 babies with opioid dependency are born each year in the United States. These babies of the opioid generation – unfairly robbed of a normal childhood—need care and justice.

The cost is enormous. The months-long hospital stays and treatment endured by NAS babies average more than $200,000 for the first year alone. Most opioid-addicted mothers live in poverty, which means taxpayers bear the cost of their children’s treatment through Medicaid, or else health care centers are stuck with the tab. In 2012, Medicaid was responsible for some 80 percent of the staggering $1.5 billion bill for treating opioid babies in America’s hospitals.

The Louisiana team of attorneys, led by Scott Bickford and Celeste Brustowicz, are now part of a national effort of lawyers and medical experts known as the Opioid Justice Team, fighting for America’s NAS babies, seeking a solution in which their long-term care would be paid for not by the nation’s taxpayers or overburdened hospitals but by the large pharmaceutical companies that bear moral responsibility.

Both Big Pharma and their distributors used deceptive or unsavory practices that enriched their own CEOs and investors, with no concern for everyday consumers. Big Pharma overhyped the benefits of their drugs and greatly underplayed the risks – which had the desired impact of convincing physicians to over-prescribe. Meanwhile, the middlemen companies that distribute these drugs to America’s pharmacies utterly failed to monitor and control the supply of opioids.

Today, with overdose deaths skyrocketing and cities, states, and health-care facilities struggling to cope, there is a wave of lawsuits targeting Big Pharma, the distributors and their liability for the opioid crisis. Many have been consolidated with Cleveland, Ohio, federal Judge Dan Aaron Polster under the multi-district litigation, or MDL, process in which a large number of lawsuits are combined in the interest of efficiency.

Our lawyers are fighting with eight other states now to make sure mistakes from the Big Tobacco lawsuits that benefitted politicians aren’t repeated, and that the babies from the opioid generation get the lifetime of comprehensive care they will need. Our goal is to provide funding — unimpeded by the traditional government social service structure — directly to NAS babies for their health and welfare needs, as well as for further study of the long-term medical effects of their opioid dependency in the womb. This requires a separate legal track for the babies’ cases and, ultimately, a unique trust fund to pay for the special medical monitoring and care.

The tragedy of America’s opioid babies is an opportunity to finally get the solution right.

– Stuart H. Smith

This article originally published in the September 10, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.