The Maryland Supreme Court tossed Baltimore’s $266 million victory in its opioid lawsuit against a pair of drug companies in a brief order issued Friday.

The decision is a major loss for the city, which adopted a go-it-alone strategy for opioid litigation that appeared to be paying off. Baltimore still won hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from drug companies that decided to pay out and avoid trial, but Friday’s Supreme Court decision tosses a major jury verdict that found opioid manufacturers liable for the city’s overdose crisis.

The order does not give reasons, but it refers back to a recent decision that put the opioid verdict in jeopardy. In it, the high court rejected a key legal theory that underpinned Baltimore’s arguments: that drug companies could be held responsible for “public nuisance” caused by the products they distributed.

A spokesperson for the city did not immediately provide a comment on the decision. The drug companies, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, also did not immediately comment. AmerisourceBergen is now known as Cencora.

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The Supreme Court’s order, signed by Chief Justice Matthew Fader, sends the case back to Baltimore City Circuit Court for further proceedings.

The city won $266 million at a jury trial against McKesson and AmerisourceBergen in 2024. A Baltimore judge slashed that verdict in half, offering the city a total of $152 million.

The city accepted the deal but appealed the decision and asked Maryland’s Supreme Court to take up the case right away. Friday’s order responds to that request.

About half a billion opioids flooded Baltimore City and Baltimore County between 2006 and 2019, the same years that drug companies were aggressively marketing painkillers and underplaying the risks of addiction, court records showed. The city argued that easy access to legal opioids created a pool of users who sought out more dangerous street drugs when painkillers became less available following a federal crackdown.

The city argued that drug companies should share in the cost of remediating the overdose crisis that followed. Baltimore has experienced the highest rate of overdose deaths of any major city in America, according to a series of articles from The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times.