On Wednesday, Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor announced settlements totaling $226.1 million with three pharmacy chains and a drug manufacturer over the opioid epidemic, bringing the state’s total recoveries to over $1 billion.
O’Connor estimates that between 2016 and 2020, approximately 3,000 Oklahomans would die from opioid overdoses.
Oklahoma Opioid Epidemic
Oklahoma was the first state in 2019 to reach a $270 million settlement with OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma.
The most recent settlements include $79.5 million from Walgreens, $73 million from CVS, $41 million from Walmart, and $32.6 million from the maker of opioids, Allergan.
In recent years, state and local governments have secured settlements with pharmacy chains, drug distributors, and manufacturers totaling about $50 billion.
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US Opioid Crisis
A spokeswoman for Walmart stated that the corporation signed a national settlement agreement to pay around $3.1 billion to resolve opioid-related litigation.
In November, three of the top pharmacy chains in the United States negotiated settlements with states over the impact of opioids totaling over $13 billion. CVS Health and Walgreen Co. are each paying approximately $5 billion, while Walmart is paying more than $3 billion. No one has accepted guilt.
The entire amount of proposed and approved settlements exceed $50 billion at this time. Unlike cigarette business settlements in the 1990s, the majority of the funds must be spent to combat the opioid problem, which has been connected to over 500,000 fatalities in the United States since 2000.
In 2019, a district court judge ruled that Johnson & Johnson and its Belgian subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals violated the state’s public nuisance legislation and finally ordered the firm to pay the state $465 million to assist combat the state’s opioid crisis.
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