Jurors at Baltimore’s trial against opioid distributors will not be able to award punitive damages if they find the drug companies liable for the city’s addiction and overdose crisis, a judge ruled Tuesday.

While the trial will continue and other types of money damages are still on the table, Baltimore City Circuit Judge Lawrence P. Fletcher-Hill decided there is not enough evidence to support punitive damages against the companies, shrinking the pool of cash jurors will be able to award if they find the distributors legally responsible for harms the city has experienced.

The decision is a blow to the city and a win for the drug companies, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen. But it was not entirely unexpected because of Maryland’s high legal standard for punitive damages, which are designed to punish defendants for particularly egregious conduct.

Fletcher-Hill found the city failed to show “actual malice,” the legal requirement for punitive damages. In other words, the city had to show that McKesson and AmerisourceBergen intended to cause harm when they shipped millions of opioids to the Baltimore area, as opposed to merely being negligent.

The city declined to comment Tuesday because the trial is ongoing. McKesson also declined to comment. AmerisourceBergen did not immediately provide a comment on the decision.

Baltimore’s lawsuit claims the drug companies ignored regulations that required them to block suspiciously large orders of opioids and sent huge quantities of painkillers to local pharmacy customers that were showing clear red flags for drug diversion.

The city argues that the influx of legal opioids being shipped to the Baltimore area reversed progress Baltimore had made in reducing fatal opioid overdoses and made the problem significantly worse. Baltimore’s overdose death rate from 2018 to 2022 was nearly double that of any other large American city, a Banner/New York Times investigation found this year.

City attorneys rested Monday after presenting evidence for about a month.

Before the drug companies began making their defenses, they asked Fletcher-Hill to find the city had not presented enough evidence for the case to continue. That’s a standard step when a plaintiff finishes presenting evidence at a trial.

City attorneys countered that they had evidence the companies knew about red flags at problem pharmacies and ignored them or failed to act until the damage had already been done.

“We showed intentional efforts to hide and not report suspicious conduct,” said Cory Buland, a partner at the city’s outside law firm, Susman Godfrey.

The attorneys pointed to parody emails about addiction that AmerisourceBergen’s regulatory team shared internally as further evidence of an attitude of “callousness” at the company.

Fletcher-Hill rejected the drug companies’ argument that the entire lawsuit should be thrown out at this stage. He agreed, however, that there was not enough evidence to support punitive damages.

While there is evidence that the drug distributors’ systems for monitoring suspicious orders of controlled substances may have been inadequate, the judge said, that does not meet the “actual malice” standard.

Jurors will still be able to award compensatory damages, which are intended to cover specific losses, if they find the companies liable. In this case, that could include millions of dollars the city has spent on remediating the opioid crisis.

Fletcher-Hill on Tuesday also expressed skepticism about other aspects of the city’s case, including testimony from a key expert witness, Gary Tuggle. Tuggle, a DEA veteran and former interim commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, used federal drug sales data to identify hundreds of thousands of orders he considered “suspicious” that were sent to Baltimore pharmacies.

Fletcher-Hill echoed doubts about Tuggle’s methodologies that were raised by McKesson and AmerisourceBergen on cross-examination. The judge was also sympathetic to the distributors’ argument that they should not be held solely responsible for the enormous volume of opioids that flooded Baltimore because doctors across the nation were prescribing painkillers at an unprecedented rate during the same period.

Testimony in the case will resume Thursday as the drug companies continue presenting evidence.