I have no idea who said it, it’s been attributed to a lot of people, but I love the saying, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” It’s funny because it’s true. It’s important for the same reason. Throughout my career in policy and politics I have been lucky to work and become friends with some really smart people (make no mistake, there were a lot of dumb ones too). As they have moved on to other jobs, they still write some brilliant columns that do what all good columns do: make you think.
One person who did just that, and still does, is former Congressman Ernest Istook (R-OK). He was a colleague of mine at the Heritage Foundation, and a softball teammate. We went several years without losing a game, just FYI. He lived in Washington, D.C., after leaving Congress, but he always kept up with Oklahoma. He is a good and decent man; when he speaks, I listen. So when I saw his latest column, “Oklahoma opioid verdict tests our how government is supposed to work,” I took notice. While it’s about Oklahoma, it’s matters everywhere because stupid progressive ideas are never contained to one area. They spread like COVID.
Istook lays out the story of pharmaceutical companies being sued by the state for their alleged culpability in the opioid crisis. “On appeal is a trial judge’s order that a pharmaceutical company must pay $465 million to create 36 new government programs to address the opioid epidemic, adding an estimated 1,734 new state workers,” he writes.
If you were left scratching your head after reading that, you are not alone. Under what authority can a judge fine a company to fund government programs he just created out of thin air? None that I’m aware of, though I’m not a lawyer (Istook is). Moreover, simple math tells you that 1,734 jobs funded with that fine would break out to $268,166.09 per job for one year. These would be “state workers,” which means those jobs would never go away.
Crazier still, because those jobs would be government jobs, the state’s attorney general, rather than be horrified at the concept of a judge creating new government programs and fining companies to pay for them, is suing for more money to fund them for longer. Istook continues, “Oklahoma’s attorney general, who filed the lawsuit, is asking the Supreme Court to increase the judgment to $9.3 billion, to fund everything for 20 years.”
What in the hell is going on in “red” Oklahoma?
Turns out this judge seems to believe that public nuisance laws empower him to impose what should seem like everyone to be a legislative “fix,” if it’s a fix at all.
Opioid abuse and addiction is a serious problem, but nothing justifies a naked abuse of power. What pharmaceutical companies produce to manage pain can be addictive, of course, and they can certainly be abused. But they also improve lives immeasurably when used properly.
This issue hits close to home for me. My late mother lived in severe pain for much of her life, I have vague memories without her in pain. She had countless health issues and had to have her right leg amputated when I was a boy. The shooting phantom pain alone could bring her to tears sometimes. Nothing made it go away, but the pain pills helped as much as anything. If the companies that create these miracles for chronic pain were sued out of existence, or fined to the point that they stop manufacturing that class of drugs simply because some people abuse them, then people who need them will suffer. People like my mother will suffer.
Remember how I said stupidity never remains contained? Istook writes, “Dozens of attorneys general from other states have asked Oklahoma’s Supreme Court to uphold the opioid verdict because it would boost their own public nuisance lawsuits,” because of course they do. “The $465 million is only the tip of the iceberg. When public nuisance laws are used to address claims of crisis, there is no limit on how far judges can go. We’ve then lost the separation of powers on which our government is based.”
More than that, if this type of power grab goes unchecked, how many people will suffer? Everyone with chronic pain. If public nuisance laws can be used by judges to create government programs and fine companies to pay for it, everyone will. As Istook put it, “The need to preserve our system of government is bigger than opioids, COVID or some other crisis.” But, as we are reminded all too often, some people in power “never let a good crisis go to waste.”
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