As the Bay Area continues to struggle with a record number of opioid overdoses, drug companies were handed two major court victories in the last two weeks.
On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court threw out a $465 million opioid ruling that the state's attorney general had won against Johnson & Johnson.
And last week, a California state trial judge handed pharmaceutical companies another win in a case that was brought by the city of Oakland and Santa Clara, Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Cities, states and counties across the United States have been trying to hold drug companies and wholesale distributors responsible for the devastation wrought by massive amounts of readily available opioids.
The judges in both of these cases, however, were not convinced that opioid makers represented a "public nuisance," a concept that is at the center of the current court battles.
The rationale seems to be that once the drugs are manufactured and distributed far and wide, the companies are off the hook.
Meanwhile, people are dying in a sea of opioids.