INTRODUCTION
… The ongoing opioid crisis is a public health matter of grave concern, with nearly a quarter of a million Americans dying due to overdoses involving prescription opioids in the last two decades. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate that approximately 136 people die each day in the United States from opioid overdose and that over seventy percent of all drug overdose deaths involve some kind of opioid.
Part II of this Comment will introduce the necessary factual and historical background for understanding the opioid crisis in the United States and the role pharmaceutical companies have played in exacerbating it. It will also discuss how liability has been allocated to drug companies in the past and briefly introduce how various parties are currently seeking redress during the opioid crisis and some of the major factors that affect the proximate cause analysis in these cases. Part III of this Comment will delve deeper into specific aspects of proximate cause in various causes of action that are being advanced by state and municipal governments to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable …
Oliver Kassenbrock, When Designed Outcomes Are ‘Unforeseeable’: Proximate Causation in the OpioidCrisis, 56 UIC Law Review 259 (2023).
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