GAINESVILLE - Hall County is about to enter the national litigation process against opioid drug manufacturers and distributors.
“This is part, basically, of a national litigation front of many counties and cities, and states for that matter throughout the country, that have entered into such litigation,” County Attorney Bill Blalock told commissioners at their work session Monday afternoon.
“Assuming you pass the resolution we will be filling a civil lawsuit, probably, the middle to latter part of this week and it will be against certain manufacturers and distributors of opioid drugs,” Blalock added.
“It is basically to try and recoup the county’s damages from dealing with what is the national opioid crisis,” he explained.
Blalock said countless funds have been spent dealing with opioid abuse by sheriff’s deputies, EMT and fire services, the county’s court system, jails and medical clinics.
Blalock said entering the litigation would not cost the county financially. “It will be on a contingent fee basis. If they don’t recover we don’t pay anything.”
“It needs to be done; it keeps getting worse and worse,” Commission Chairman Richard Higgins commented.
Blalock said Hall County’s suit and legal strategy would be similar to the one filed several weeks ago and underway in Athens-Clarke County.
Commissioner Scott Gibbs said, “There’s probably not a person or a family in this room that has not been affected to some degree by this (opioid crisis).”
Higgins said after the meeting, “It’s something we were approached with. There’s a lot of counties and states that are doing this. There’s an epidemic.”
“We were told that in Hall County we have approximately 200,000 people and in 2017,” Higgins said, adding that he thinks he was quoting the statistics he had been given correctly, “there were 80 pills per person (prescribed), for every person in Hall County.”
Blalock said following the meeting that Hall County’s lawsuit will be filed at the federal level. “We will probably file in district court, federal district court in Gainesville.”
Blalock explained that efforts are already underway to handle some of the early lawsuits filed in this matter.
“There is in place, as I understand it...a multi-district litigation order, which is transferring all of these cases of a similar nature, to the middle district of Ohio and assigning it to the judge there,” Blalock said.
Blalock said he did not recall the judge’s name but, “he is going to basically try to resolve most if not all of the cases there in his court over the next year or so.”
“To the extent that it can’t be resolved he will probably send them back to the various districts where they came from for trial.”
Specifics in the lawsuit such as the amount of damages being sought, the names of the manufacturers and distributors targeted in the suit, the number and names of the complainants filing the suit and other details were not available at this writing.
The county does plan to release more details of the lawsuit if the resolution is approved by the county commission at their voting session Tuesday evening.
On Tuesday, the city of Helen also adopted a resolution to join the Georgia Municipal Association in the class action lawsuit.
