CLEVELAND (AP) – Guardians caring for hundreds of thousands of children born addicted to opioids since 2000 should be grouped together as part of the class action lawsuit filed by local governments and others against the manufacturers, distributors and sellers of prescription pain medication, lawyers argued in a motion filed in federal court in Cleveland.
In addition to certifying the guardians as a class, the attorneys who filed the motion Tuesday want U.S. District Judge Dan Polster to create a national registry to identify children diagnosed with neonatal abstinence syndrome, form a medical panel to recommend the best ways to treat such children, and provide money for those efforts as quickly as possible.
“The urgency of this is, the longer we wait, the more difficult it is to help these children,” said Cleveland attorney Marc Dann, who filed the motion along with attorneys from Texas and Louisiana.
There currently are about 400 guardians for children born addicted to opioids who have filed individual claims in the pending lawsuit that Dann said could be folded into the larger group. The motion filed this week was made initially on behalf of a handful guardians in Ohio and California and seeks to include guardians from across the country, he said.
The total number of children born addicted to opioids since 2000 is around 400,000 with between 20,000 and 30,000 NAS babies born each year, Dann said