Dan Polster

The nation’s three biggest drug distributors and a major drugmaker agreed to an 11th-hour, $260 million settlement Monday over the terrible toll taken by opioids in two Ohio counties, averting the first federal trial over the crisis. The trial, involving Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County and Akron’s Summit County, was seen as a critical test case that could have gauged the strength...

Negotiations aimed at reaching a major settlement in the nation’s opioid litigation reached an impasse Friday. Key differences were between state attorneys general and lawyers representing local governments, rather than with the drugmakers and distributors they are suing. One of the negotiators, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, said late Friday that local governments did not accept a deal worth...

The federal judge in Cleveland overseeing national opioid litigation denied the requests Thursday of several drug companies that he remove himself from the case. U.S. District Court Judge Dan Polster said in his order that he has done nothing over the past two years to favor cities and counties seeking money from the pharmaceutical industry to cover their costs of...

Attorneys for eight drug distributors, pharmacies and retailers facing trial next month for their roles in the opioid crisis want to disqualify the federal judge overseeing their cases, saying he has shown bias in his effort to obtain a multibillion-dollar global settlement. According to the motion filed late Friday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, where Judge Dan Polster presides...

“I think they are a group of sanctimonious billionaires who lied and cheated so they could make a handsome profit,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Shapiro said. “I truly believe that they have blood on their hands.”

The maker of OxyContin has been cast as the chief villain in the nation’s opioid crisis. But newly released government figures suggest Purdue Pharma had plenty of help in flooding the U.S. with billions of pills even as overdose deaths were accelerating. Records kept by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration show that 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills — the...

The roughly 2,000 state and local governments suing the drug industry over the deadly opioid crisis have yet to see any verdicts or reach any big national settlements but are already tussling with each other over how to divide any money they collect. The reason: Some of them want to avoid what happened 20 years ago, when states agreed to...

The long-running federal court case seeking to hold drugmakers responsible for the nation’s opioid crisis has a new complication: How does it deal with claims covering the thousands of babies born to addicts? Attorneys representing the children and their guardians want their claims separated from the federal case in Cleveland that involves hundreds of local governments and other entities such...

A study of the opioid epidemic reveals some disturbing numbers.

A company whose prescription opioid marketing practices are being blamed for sparking the addiction and overdose crisis says it’s helping to fund an effort to make a lower-cost overdose antidote. OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma announced Wednesday that it’s making a $3.4 million grant to Harm Reduction Therapeutics, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, to help develop a low-cost naloxone nasal spray. The announcement...

The goal is impressive: Hammer out a legal deal that starts guiding the nation out of an epidemic of opioid addiction. How and when that can happen, if at all, is the subject of talks scheduled to begin Wednesday in a federal courthouse in Cleveland.