For years, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch has portrayed the state as a trailblazer in using the courts to address the opioid epidemic. But her claim — that the attorney general’s office was the first in the country to file a state lawsuit against opioid manufacturers for the crisis — isn’t true. 

A June 2001 West Virginia case filed against Purdue Pharma and Abbott Laboratories predated the lawsuit she’s been referring to — a December 2015 suit filed by the office of Fitch’s Democratic predecessor, Jim Hood, against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and other companies that made opioid pills. 

Fitch has been making the claim about her office since at least 2021, touting the agency’s role in addressing overdose deaths that followed drug companies misrepresenting the danger and addictiveness of opioid painkillers. 

Fitch, a Republican, has used the claim to ask local governments to join the lawsuits as plaintiffs and to advertise her work to secure more dollars for the state. 

The West Virginia case, which ended in 2004 with a $10 million settlement, is cited by archivists as the first lawsuit against opioid manufacturers for their roles in the 21st century addiction epidemic. 

Kate Tasker, director of the University of California San Francisco library maintaining lawsuit records related to the crisis, said the West Virginia case is the first one her library knows about. 

When Mississippi Today reached out to Fitch’s office about the miscategorization, spokesperson MaryAsa Lee said it was the case’s unique approach that set it apart from previous lawsuits.

“Mississippi’s lawsuit – the first to sue 16 opioid manufacturers – was the first of its kind, and within 3 years, 32 other states followed our model, which ultimately brought the injunctive and monetary relief that is helping us recover from the opioid epidemic,” Lee wrote in an email. 

She did not respond to a follow up question asking how this lawsuit was the first of its kind. California filed one against nine opioid manufacturers for their roles in the overdose crisis a year earlier than Mississippi’s lawsuit.

Tasker said she was not aware of the 2015 Mississippi case. It does not appear in scholarly articles that trace timelines of prescription opioid-related litigation.

John Davidson, a Ridgeland lawyer who worked on the 2015 Mississippi case and has continued to assist Fitch’s office on opioid cases, did not respond to phone and email inquiries about that lawsuit. The website of his law firm, Davidson PLLC, says it filed “the FIRST opioid case in the country on behalf of a state government.”

William Thompson, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, was raised in that state’s southern coalfields — a region of Appalachia that, by many metrics, suffered more harm from the overdose crisis than anywhere in the country. He remembers people he grew up with who had the potential to become doctors, lawyers, engineers or teachers, but were never able to escape addiction.

Thompson said West Virginia’s 2001 lawsuit and a series of cases against opioid distributing companies were filed out of necessity, as the public health crisis was taking over the state. He said some of the settlement dollars from the first case were used to help start a southern West Virginia court that connects people struggling with addiction to treatment, a program he oversaw as a circuit court judge. 

“It’s sad when you see your home community devastated by opioids, and that it has to be the laboratory for some type of solution to the problem,” Thompson said. 

He said he welcomes any elected officials, in Mississippi or elsewhere, using their positions to combat the calamity that has claimed more than a million lives. From new drugs of concern to diminishing federal mental health investments, the crisis is changing in ways that require states to think of innovative solutions. 

“But this has been a problem,” Thompson said. “And this is something that the courts have tried to fix since at least 2001.”