SILLY SUIT OXY LITIGATION COULD SET A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT

Ponder this scenario.

An employee of a liquor store, as time goes on, develops a dependency on
alcohol.

To feed that habit, that employee soon begins stealing alcohol from the
business and taking it home largely for his own use. At some point, the
employee - most likely under the influence of alcohol - is driving a friend
around when he crashes his car, injuring the passenger and getting himself
charged in connection with the accident after police find alcohol in the
vehicle. About a year later, the passenger files suit not only against the
driver of the vehicle for damages in return for his injuries, but also the
owners of the liquor store the man worked at, alleging their failure to
keep track of the missing inventory led to the employee's addiction and the
accident. Sounds kind of illogical, right?

Or in the least, a pretty good stretch. But that's exactly what happened
less than two weeks ago in Pike Circuit Court when Joshua Justice filed
suit against Scott R. Justice, a Pikeville man who was sentenced last year
to five years in prison for trafficking some portion of the thousands of
OxyContin pills he took from Total Pharmacy Care of Pikeville and Phelps
while working at the stores.

Joshua Justice claims being under the influence of those drugs caused Scott
Justice to crash his vehicle last March. Joshua Justice was injured, while
Scott Justice - the driver - was charged for possessing controlled
substances OxyContin and Alprazolam.

While Joshua Justice appears in a position to receive damages in connection
with his injuries and that allegation, our problem with the case starts
when he claims the pharmacy's co-owners and pharmacists are just as liable
as Scott Justice in causing the wreck. The suit claims that's because they
should have known the pills Scott Justice took were unaccounted for, and
that they failed to provide adequate security for their controlled
substances. Such negligence, the action further claims, directly led to
Scott Justice's drug addiction and the crash itself.

But what Joshua Justice likely sees as an opportunity to collect
undetermined sums from an obviously profitable pharmacy, we see as flawed
logic that seeks to take advantage of an already bad situation surrounding
America's most maligned prescription drug.

The pharmacy's owners and pharmacists indeed might not have undertaken
stringent security and accountability measures the dispensing of OxyContin
now warrants. Had they done so, it might not have taken a drug-related car
crash to set off a police investigation into Scott Justice being linked to
roughly 5,000 missing narcotic pills.

Still, stretching that possibility into those persons being the direct
cause of the accident that injured Joshua Justice is a jump we're not
willing to make. And neither should the local court system.

The judiciary should take a hard look at this case and opt to throw out the
pharmacy's owners and pharmacists as defendants. If it doesn't, it could be
creating a dangerous precedent that could set the state up for a logjam of
litigation. And that litigation could financially slam dunk pharmacies
everywhere over similar situations involving not only OxyContin, but
literally hundreds of other prescription drugs used and abused for years.

As a newspaper that has chronicled OxyContin's deadly explosion since well
before the national media even knew what it was, we're never hesitant to
criticize the drug over the snobbery of its manufacturer or the doctors who
overprescribe or misprescribe it because of the money it generates.

But not this time.