Marc Malon, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, said Maine, California, Hawaii and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits on the same day as part of a coordinated strategy, although the specifics of the lawsuits are somewhat different because laws in each state are different. Portland, Bangor and other Maine municipalities have filed lawsuits against Purdue Pharma and other drug manufacturers over the opioid crisis.

Forty states and more than 2,000 local governments have previously filed lawsuits against Purdue Pharma. The legal strategy is similar to when states sued tobacco companies, resulting in a 1998 settlement that paid billions to states for tobacco companies falsely claiming that tobacco was a safe product.

Malon said that the amount of damages the Maine Attorney General’s Office is seeking hasn’t yet been publicly disclosed but will be during court hearings.

Robert Josephson, a spokesman for Purdue Pharma, pointed to how a judge in a state court in North Dakota on May 10 dismissed a lawsuit brought by the North Dakota attorney general in that state.

In the 27-page decision, North Dakota District Judge James Hill ruled that Purdue “cannot control how doctors prescribe its products and certainly cannot control how individual patients use and respond to its products.”

Josephson said that “Purdue Pharma vigorously denies the allegations contained in litigation against the company and will continue to defend itself against these misleading attacks. These sensationalized claims are part of a continuing effort to try these cases in the court of public opinion rather than the justice system, as plaintiffs are unable to connect the conduct alleged to the harm described. Instead, they have invented stunningly overbroad legal theories, which if adopted by courts, will undermine the bedrock legal principle of causation.”

But Frey argued in court filings that Purdue Pharma has made “unsubstantiated claims about how opioids lead to addiction and the extent to which addiction risk can be managed” and has been “misrepresenting and making unsubstantiated claims that increased doses of opioids did not pose significant additional risks of addiction.”

In 2016, Maine lawmakers approved a strict new prescribing law that, in some cases, limits dosages and length of prescriptions for chronic pain.

Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, praised Frey for filing suit.

“It’s clear that several pharmaceutical companies, including Purdue Pharma, aggressively pushed opioids onto patients, physicians and the general public,” Jackson said. “They need to be held accountable for their role in this epidemic and the lengths they stooped to while trying to make obscene profits.”