100 Suboxone Film Tooth Decay Lawsuits Selected for Next Phase of Bellwether Discovery

The list will ultimately be reduced to 15 representative claims, which will be eligible to serve as early bellwether trials to gauge how juries may respond to evidence in thousands of Suboxone film tooth decay lawsuits.

The U.S. District Judge presiding over all Suboxone film tooth decay lawsuits has identified 100 claims that will move forward through coordinated core discovery proceedings, with a subset to be later selected for early bellwether trials.

The selections were made from thousands of product liability lawsuits currently being pursued against the makers of the buprenorphine and naloxone film strips, which have been widely used in recent years to treat opioid addiction. Each claim involves similar allegations that users were left with devastating tooth decay and dental injuries, since they were not adequately warned about the potential risks associated with Suboxone film strips.

Suboxone was first introduced as a tablet and later reformulated into a dissolvable film that patients place under the tongue. After the film version entered the market, Indivior and federal regulators began receiving reports of significant Suboxone film side effects, leading the FDA to require a warning about tooth decay and other oral health risks in June 2022.

In the months and years that followed, thousands of Suboxone tooth decay lawsuits have been filed in federal courts nationwide, alleging the manufacturers placed a desire for profits before patient safety, by withholding information about the risks of dental erosion, severe tooth damage and tooth loss associated with Suboxone use.

Given the growing number of claims, all federal cases were consolidated into a Suboxone film tooth decay lawsuit multidistrict litigation (MDL) in the Northern District of Ohio under U.S. District Judge Philip Calabrese, who is guiding the cases through coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings.

Early in the litigation, Judge Calabrese announced that the Court would employ a bellwether trial process, which will prepare representative cases for early trial dates to help gauge how juries may respond to evidence and testimony likely to be repeated throughout the litigation. In May 2025 the judge designated 500 cases as part of a Records Collection Pool, with the goal of having each plaintiff produce records allowing the parties to narrow that pool down to 100 representative cases for the next phase of discovery.

On February 10, Judge Calabrese issued an order (PDF) listing the 100 cases that will form the core discovery pool. All of the selected claims were randomly chosen from a list of plaintiffs in the Records Collection Pool that have provided substantially complete records to the defendants.

These lawsuits will go through further discovery. The order calls for the plaintiffs to submit Plaintiff Fact Sheets and related documents by April 20, 2026. The defendant fact sheets and documents are due for those plaintiffs by May 20, 2026.

Once all of the data has been collected for the core discovery pool lawsuits, it is expected that a final group of 15 Suboxone lawsuits will be prepared for the first bellwether trials.

While the outcome of these bellwether trials will not be binding on any remaining claims, the average payouts awarded by juries may have a significant impact on future Suboxone settlements. However, if no settlement or other resolution is achieved during the pretrial proceedings, Judge Calabrese is likely to remand the cases back to their originating federal districts for individual trial dates.

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