BALTIMORE — Baltimore settled with opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals on the eve of its trial against that company and two distributors of opioids that the city accused of aggressively marketing the drugs and pumping them into pharmacies here.

The terms of the settlement were not outlined in a joint Sunday night filing informing the court of the agreement.

Johnson & Johnson declined to comment on the settlement.

Bryan Doherty, a spokesman for Democratic Mayor Brandon Scott, confirmed in an email that the city settled with Johnson & Johnson.

“The City cannot at this time discuss any of the specific terms of the settlement,” Doherty said. “It is one of the stipulations of the agreement that we cannot discuss specific terms until” the cases against the remaining defendants conclude.

Before the latest settlement, Baltimore had secured $402.5 million from settlements with various opioid companies.

Baltimore’s remaining claims against opioid distributors McKesson and AmerisourceBergen appear slated to proceed to trial this week. Jury selection began Monday and it could take several days for attorneys to find jurors who are able to preside over a trial scheduled to go through November.

In its 2018 lawsuit, Baltimore alleged Johnson & Johnson and other opioid manufacturers and distributors falsely advertised their drugs to downplay their addictiveness, bribed doctors under the guise of speaking engagements and ignored suspiciously large orders for their products.

Johnson & Johnson produced two opioid medications cited in the complaint: Duragesic, which was a patch form of fentanyl, and Nucynta.

“Janssen sought to expand the use of Duragesic through, for example, advertisements proclaiming, ‘It’s not just for end stage cancer anymore!'” attorneys for the city wrote in the complaint. “This claim earned Janssen a warning letter from the (U.S. Food and Drug Administration), for representing that Duragesic was ‘more useful in a broader range of conditions or patients than has been demonstrated by substantial evidence.'”

Johnson & Johnson regularly made more than $1 billion annually in sales of Duragesic up to 2009, the lawsuit said. Sales of Nucynta and the extended release version of that drug, Nucynta ER, brought in $172 million in 2014.

In a statement before it reached a settlement with the city, a spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson and Janssen said the companies “deeply sympathize with those affected by the impact of opioid abuse and addiction” and cited a 2022 settlement with states and municipalities around the country that “brought immediate financial support to address the opioid crisis.”

Baltimore, hard hit by the opioid epidemic, opted out of that settlement to pursue its claim separately.

The Johnson & Johnson spokesperson said Baltimore’s claims have “no basis in the facts or the law” and that evidence would show “Janssen did everything a responsible manufacturer of these important prescription pain medicines should do.”

The city sued Johnson & Johnson and other opioid companies under the state’s public nuisance statute, arguing that the the businesses manufacturing, marketing and distribution of prescription opioids fueled the illicit opioid epidemic driven by heroin and, later, fentanyl use. The defendants’ actions, the city argues, amount to a level of nuisance that deprived the Baltimore’s residents of public rights.

One of the experts retained by the city, Brendan Saloner, a professor of American health in addiction at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, calculated that “83% of (opioid use disorder) cases in Baltimore in each year from 2010-2021 are attributable to the misuse of prescription opioids prior to any heroin use,” the city’s lawyers wrote in recent court papers.

The city also said it uncovered internal Johnson & Johnson documents that “acknowledge the link between prescription opioid use and subsequent illicit opioid use.”

“Abusers of [Janssen’s] reservoir patch who experiment and in many cases overdose, sometimes die’ and that ‘in the future’ as the Duragesic market grows, Duragesic ‘might not be safe,’” attorneys for the city wrote of one such document.

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