Illustrations by Jon Han

Meet the ‘Hillbilly Lawyer’ Fighting to Take Down Big Pharma

Inside the massive lawsuit that seeks to assign blame — and financial penalties — for the opioid epidemic

Jessica Wapner
OneZero
Published in
23 min readMar 21, 2019

PPaul Farrell paced the courtroom as lawyers filed into place: plaintiffs on the left, defendants to the right, briefcases down, folders out. Outside the chambers, Lake Erie glistened…

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Jessica Wapner
OneZero

Jessica Wapner is a freelance science journalist from New York with bylines in Wired, the New York Times, Popular Science and many other major publications.