Criminal Justice

Federal prosecutors are charging 11 doctors with unlawfully distributing opioids and other substances, in the second large operation to target "pill mill" operators and health care fraud this year. Two other people also face charges in the sting.

CINCINNATI — A Green Township doctor was one of 11 physicians charged in a federal drug bust, officials said in a news release Tuesday.

(Reuters) - The Ohio hospital that employed a doctor charged with 25 counts of murder for giving often fatal doses of opioid painkillers to dozens of sick patients said on Tuesday it has settled two wrongful death lawsuits for a total of $9 million.

For the families of the roughly 400,000 Americans who have died of opioid drug overdoses since 1999, a legal drama scheduled to unfold in an Ohio courtroom next month may feel like a true shot at justice.

Upcoming trials seen as test cases for forcing drugmakers to pay for societal damage inflicted by the opioid epidemic should be delayed until Ohio's own lawsuits against the drugmakers can be heard, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost argued in a lawsuit.

A jury in Boston has found onetime billionaire and drug company executive John Kapoor and his four co-defendants guilty of a racketeering conspiracy. The verdict came Wednesday after 15 days of deliberation.

In what could be the first-of-its-kind courthouse-based program in Ohio, jail inmates upon release receive their initial shot of Vivitrol, a medication that reduces cravings and blocks brain receptors from feeling opioids’ effects, in Franklin County Municipal Court.

Faced with a flood of addicted inmates and challenged by lawsuits, America's county jails are struggling to adjust to an opioid health crisis that has turned many of the jails into their area's largest drug treatment centers.