WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned away a novel case by Arizona seeking to recover billions of dollars that the state has said that members of the Sackler family - owners of Purdue Pharma LP - funneled out of the OxyContin maker before the company filed for bankruptcy in September.

Americans are concerned about the high price of drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has become a system rife with gaming. Profits are regularly prioritized over patients. Laws meant to encourage innovation, recoup private investment, and ensure patient access are too often manipulated to suppress competition and increase prices. These unscrupulous industry practices can take many forms, but the result is always the same: Drug prices increase in a captive market. Gimmicks and price increases are costly to patients and taxpayers. No conservative should defend the status quo.

A hospital is a menagerie of dangerous products. The magnets in an MRI scanner could hurl an IV pole across the room and impale a person. A defibrillator can restart your heart, but the same electric shock could stop it. The operating room is a repository of scalpels and saws and drills made specifically to penetrate and shred human organs.

An Oklahoma judge on Monday ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay over $572 million for pushing doctors to prescribe opioids while downplaying the risks of addiction, actions that state prosecutors said helped fuel the state's opioid epidemic andled to more than 6,000 deaths over nearly two decades.

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter claimed in court that the sales push by Johnson & Johnson and its pharmaceutical subsidiary, Janssen, starting in the 1990s had created “a public nuisance” that led to the deaths.

Johnson & Johnson will be forced to pay more than a half-billion dollars in damages after an Oklahoma judge on Monday ruled the drug maker accountable for fueling the state’s opioid epidemic, according to a report.

The pharmaceutical giant will be forced to pay the state of Oklahoma $572 million as part of the landmark case, which is the first in the US seeking to hold companies responsible for creating an oversupply of addictive painkillers, CNN reported.

Johnson & Johnson must pay $572 million for contributing to an opioid-addiction crisis in Oklahoma, a judge there ruled Monday in a closely watched trial.

The verdict comes in the first case to go to trial of more than 2,000 brought by state and local municipalities nationwide seeking to hold the pharmaceutical industry accountable for widespread opioid abuse.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – An Ohio lawmaker has an innovative solution to the state's problem with securing execution drugs: use fentanyl seized by police instead.

Republican state Rep. Scott Wiggam is working on legislation to allow Ohio prison officials to obtain fentanyl from drug busts. That option is far more humane than the electric chair or firing squad – options that states are considering as pharmaceutical companies cut off access to execution drugs.

The opioid epidemic or opioid crisis is a term that generally refers to the rapid increase in the use of prescription and nonprescription opioid drugs, in the United States, beginning in the late 1990s. The increase in opioid overdose deaths has been dramatic, and opioids were responsible for 47,600 of the 70,200 drug overdose deaths overall in the US in 2017. The rate of prolonged opioid use is increasing globally.

Three recent developments in lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors point to different models of justice, from criminal prosecution to a $37 million payout without admission of wrongdoing.

What does justice look like in the opioid crisis? Three recent decisions in bellwether lawsuits offer different models of how best to move forward and help individuals and communities rebuild as more than 1,600 lawsuits chug through America’s legal system.

New York state Attorney General Letitia James leveled the fiercest legal broadside yet against the Sackler family, owners of the privately-held Purdue Pharma which makes the powerful prescription painkiller Oxycontin.

A civil suit filed Thursday accuses eight members of the family of personally contributing to the deadly opioid epidemic, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans over the last two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.