I don't know the facts of the case, but I imagine that the main thrust of the lawsuit is that the side effects were either undersold or ignored altogether by the manufacturer. When Oxycontin was first introduced, the manufacturer went to great lengths to say in their marketing that "less than 1% of people who take pain medicine for pain become addicts." They repeated this line over and over, and they ignored all the contrary evidence. Malicious intent or fraud notwithstanding, I think it could be argued that many pain medicines are defective products, and have caused great injuries to many legal users of them. Although I'm sympathetic to the argument that people bear a lot of the responsibility for this problem themselves, for the above reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if lawsuits like these prove to be successful.
yeah. i will be monitoring this one with interest as it stumbles deeper into the abyss of the american judicial system. but judges are lately rather more afraid of the precedent they are setting for future cases than of the short-term repercussions of the decision at hand, which i think weighs in favor of pharma. i very much doubt they will be culpable, so far removed as they are from the physical insertion of the drug into the body. and oxy has helped plenty of people recover from injuries and surgeries. tough question.