The city of Baltimore wants to go straight to Maryland’s highest court as it appeals a judge’s decision to slash a $266 million verdict in its opioid-related lawsuit against two of the nation’s largest drug distributors.

The drug companies, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, will also ask the Maryland Supreme Court to hear the case immediately, according to the city’s filing.

The state Supreme Court can sometimes decide to take up important cases directly, skipping Maryland’s intermediate appeals court, and is involved in a similar opioid lawsuit against pharmacy benefit managers and drug distributors brought by Anne Arundel County.

During a seven-week trial last year, the city of Baltimore argued that McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, now known as Cencora, failed to halt suspiciously large orders of opioid painkillers being sent to area pharmacies, creating a population of people with opioid use disorder who turned to more dangerous street drugs when the prescription drug supply slowed down. Jurors awarded the city a $266 million verdict and found the two companies mostly responsible for the harm caused by the opioid epidemic.

But Baltimore City Circuit Judge Lawrence Fletcher-Hill ruled in June that the jury’s verdict was “grossly excessive” and proposed that the companies pay only $52 million, to reflect a much lower level of liability than the jury assigned, or receive a new trial. Fletcher-Hill later offered Baltimore an additional $100 million in abatement money aimed at remediating the ongoing harms of the epidemic if the city agreed to the reduced verdict.

All told, the $152 million was far less than the city wanted, though it also got to keep more than $400 million in settlements it won from other companies that chose not to go to trial. The drug companies were also dissatisfied, with McKesson quickly promising to appeal.

In its petition to the Maryland Supreme Court, Baltimore argued that the high court should take up the case right away because of the continuing effects of the opioid crisis on the city.

“Immediate review is warranted,” the city’s lawyers wrote to the state Supreme Court. “The opioid crisis continued to affect Baltimore, Maryland’s largest city. … As the jury determined, the epidemic has already cost [the city] more than $270 million, and the court should grant this petition to eliminate additional unnecessary delay.”

The appeal would center on Maryland’s public nuisance law, under which Baltimore and other local governments have brought claims against drug companies in opioid lawsuits. The city argued that McKesson and AmerisourceBergen created a nuisance that harmed public health and safety by allowing massive quantities of opioids to be shipped to the Baltimore area.

The drug companies, however, have argued that public nuisance claims can only be applied to property, such as in a case where a company pollutes a lake. They have also claimed that public nuisance law cannot apply to harms caused by lawful products, like opioid painkillers.

The Maryland Supreme Court is already considering this question in a pending appeal stemming from an Anne Arundel County opioid lawsuit against pharmacy benefit managers and other drug companies. Unlike Baltimore’s case, that lawsuit has not yet gone to trial. It is in federal court, where a judge in January put the case on hold pending a decision on the public nuisance question from the Maryland Supreme Court. A federal judge can ask a state Supreme Court to weigh in on an issue that is relevant to a federal case to ensure that state law is applied correctly.

The public nuisance question has long been expected to end up before Maryland’s Supreme Court. During a hearing in the Baltimore lawsuit, Fletcher-Hill previously expressed “serious reservations about the use of public nuisance claims to address social problems of this breadth and complexity.”

Baltimore is also asking the Maryland Supreme Court to reconsider other decisions Fletcher-Hill made in the case, including the way he split up harm among the defendants in the lawsuit and reduced the abatement money awarded to the city.

The Supreme Court has not yet announced whether it will take up the appeal.

Madeleine O’Neill is a freelance reporter based in Baltimore.