San Antonio is joining Bexar County in considering a lawsuit against opioid drug manufacturers, 1200 WOAI News reports.
A special City Council session this week involved a briefing from city attorneys about what type of legal action could be pursued to recapture money spent on increased policing, ems calls and autopsies, all tied to overdose deaths.
"In my district, and throughout the city, we have people who are having to live with it now," Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran tells Newsradio 1200 WOAI. "We need to have some sort of part in holding people accountable."
More than two dozen states, cities and counties, including several in Texas, have filed such lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies. The claims are that the companies aggressively marketed the drugs and lied about the risks.
What starts, in many cases, as pain pills leads to an addiction to opioids, and a trip to the emergency room.
Wendell Campbell with the DEA in Texas says, in San Antonio, hospitals are seeing, at times, 20 overdoses a day, linked to opioids. That is what has fueled Bexar County to consider a lawsuit
."Opioids and the derivatives have gone up three times what we saw in the 2000s,” Judge Nelson Wolff said. "Too may prescriptions. Too many people getting hooked on drugs."
Recently, a newly formed task force is aiming to get a head of the problem.
One of the main parts is educating doctors about a drug monitoring database, so they’re not over-prescribing pain killers.
The San Antonio Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse is receiving a big chunk of $27 million in federal funding awarded to the state to deal with the horrible problem of addiction to pain killers. Texas is getting more money than any other state.