The state Attorney General's Office has joined a multi-state investigation of the pharmaceutical industry for its potential role in the opioid crisis that has swept the state and the country, The Record has learned. Separately, the office has issued a subpoena to Johnson & Johnson, the New Brunswick-based pharmaceutical company, related to the marketing practices for opioids by subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
The multiple investigations by the Attorney General's Office are among the latest steps in a growing national legal effort to seek a level of accountability in what has become one of the deadliest public health crises in modern American history. Drug overdoses, fueled mostly by heroin and other opioids, killed more than 52,000 people in 2015, more than the roughly 43,000 who died at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1995. And the country appears on track to have exceeded 59,000 drug-related deaths last year, according to preliminary data analyzed by The New York Times.
