An amended complaint naming additional drug firms believed to have helped fuel West Virginia’s opioid epidemic has been filed in federal court after attorneys for by Cabell County received drug distribution data from the federal government last week.

The drug-reporting database, ARCOS, is a comprehensive drug reporting system that monitors the flow of the DEA-controlled substances from the time they are created to when they get into the hands of patients. The data were ordered to be turned over to the case’s complainants under seal and none of the information has been made public.

Paul T. Farrell Jr., who is a co-leader in an opioid litigation case involving hundreds of cities nationwide that started in Cabell County, said the disclosure of this information, which includes 27 gigabyte of raw data, not only allows him to see the transactions between manufacturers and wholesalers, but also the transactions between the wholesalers and the pharmacies in Cabell County.

“We are going to be able to track pills and figure out how it is we got the volume of pills that came flooding into our hometown,” he said. “If this were the Daytona 500 … this is the green flag.”

The companies added in the amended complaint are seven manufacturers as well as companies associated with them, including Purdue Pharma, Actavis, Cephalon, Janssen, Endo, Insys Therapeutics and Mallinckrodt, because of their alleged improper marketing of the opioids they manufactured.

Although the Drug Enforcement Administration highly objected to releasing the information, plaintiffs in the national prescription opiate litigation won their request that ARCOS data for years 2006 to 2015 for any type of transactions involving the drugs oxycodone, hydrocodone, hydromorphone and fentanyl be made available to them for the litigation.

The documents and court orders relate to 500 civil complaints, according to Farrell, filed in federal courts across the nation alleging drug firms, manufacturers and distributors breached their duty to monitor, detect, investigate, refuse and report suspicious orders of prescription opiates coming into West Virginia over the past several years – a duty the lawsuit claims companies had under the Controlled Substance Act of 1970.

Cabell County was among the first to file a lawsuit against the “Big Three” distributors -McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp., and several other pharmacy companies, which are named in a majority of the lawsuits.

The filings started in West Virginia after a 2016 Charleston Gazette-Mail investigation revealed similar data, stating between 2007 and 2012 that the “Big Three” shipped 423 million pain pills to West Virginia, which has about 1.8 million citizens, before the number of pills started to decrease.

The information Farrell and other plaintiffs’ attorneys have would expand on that data.

Some of that data could have been revealed Wednesday in seven amended complaints filed by Farrell, but Dan Polster, the U.S. district judge in Cleveland overseeing the case, agreed the complaints could be filed under seal, meaning out of the public’s view.

The motion to file under seal, filed by plaintiffs in the case, stated the seal was necessary to ensure compliance with previous court orders requiring the Drug Enforcement Administration drug-reporting database data to be sealed.

After receiving the DEA data last week, Farrell said he filed an order Wednesday amending the Cabell County civil complaint to include additional manufacturers and distributors they did not initially name due to the data not being made available.