Jurors in Baltimore’s Circuit Court ruled in favor of the city and awarded it $266 million in its case against two opioid distributors.

The jury’s decision is $6 million more than what the city sought from McKesson and Amerisource Bergen.

The companies will still have an opportunity to appeal the decision.

If the verdict stays, Baltimore will have won about $668 million from companies involved in the opioid crisis.

The details of the city's settlement with Johnson & Johnson is still under wraps.

Baltimore took a risk in individually suing opioid companies instead of signing on to a larger settlement with states from all over the nation.

“It's a substantial victory for the city, which didn't join with the state and now has been vindicated in a number of cases and secured much more money than the state did,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

Attorneys for the city brought up Drug Enforcement Agency experts, city officials and showed depositions from top ranking executives in the companies.

The city’s lawyers led by Bill Carmody, a partner at Susman Godfrey, made the case to jurors in the Circuit Court of Baltimore City that the companies ignored warnings from the Drug Enforcement Agency that even one out-of-line pharmacy could pose huge dangers to the community.

The lawyers stated that the companies purposely did not report pharmacies that overfilled opioids and even worked with the pharmacies to skirt laws and fill the most prescriptions without raising flags.

To that end, the city’s lawyers are alleging that the flood of opioid prescriptions, poorly regulated distribution and loose oversight hooked a disproportionate amount of Baltimoreans on the drugs and caused up to 80% of the opioid use disorder in the city.

That, the lawyers say, caused an influx in overdoses and a strain on city resources.

McKesson and Amerisource will now have an opportunity to bring up their own witnesses as they begin their defense.

The companies are claiming that they were purely the middlemen in the situation.

Amerisource’s lead lawyer Robert Nicholas, a partner at Reed Smith, said the city’s suit is purely about money and that the company complied with what the Drug Enforcement Agency asked.

The companies’ attorneys tried to pin the blame of the opioid epidemic on drug cartels and gangs for selling illegal drugs and on doctors for overprescribing legal opioids.

The lawyers claimed that the companies had no responsibility to decide if someone was in need of opioids or not, but rather it was the doctor who decided that.

The lawyers also stated that the Drug Enforcement Agency was notified of all drugs that were moved and therefore should have been more aware of issues.

In 2022, Nicholas successfully defended Amerisource in a case where West Virginia tried to tie distributors to the opioid crisis.