CHARLESTON – The city of Clarksburg has hired Charleston attorney Rusty Webb to represent it in litigation involving the opioid epidemic plaguing the state.
The city retained Webb on Sept. 17.
"When somebody causes a problem that hurts other people, then there is a way to get a remedy from the courts," Mayor Ryan Kennedy said. "And I am certainly open to the possibility to the city pursuing some remedies because we’ve had to put out a lot of money, and there has been a lot of bad stuff that has happened in Clarksburg that wouldn’t have happened had the opioid crisis not occurred."
Webb
Webb represents many of the municipalities that have filed lawsuits against drug distributors and manufacturers in West Virginia, including Charleston, Clarksburg, Huntington, Dunbar, St. Albans, South Charleston, Parkersburg, Bluefield, Hurricane, Nitro, Princeton and Buckhannon. Webb was also recently retained by the town of Belle to represent it in opioid litigation.
Webb previously said any municipality that has a fire department or police department has a claim to file a case against opioid manufacturers and distributors.
The bulk of the opioid litigation has been filed in federal court and transferred to U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Cleveland before Federal Judge Dan Polster.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report last year stating the economic cost of the opioid drug epidemic in 2015 was $504 billion, more than six times larger than the most recent estimated costs, according to the council.
The epidemic’s impact in 2015 is equivalent to 2.8 percent of the country’s gross domestic product for that year, according to the council's report.
