West Virginia won $99 million in a settlement with Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals over its role in perpetuating the opioid epidemic that has wracked the state.
The settlement, announced Monday, will remove J&J from a lawsuit against pharmaceutical giants Teva and AbbVie’s Allergan for, what the state argues, has caused a “tsunami” of opioid addiction in West Virginia by misleading prescribers about the risks of opioid painkillers and marketing them too aggressively.
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“This settlement will provide significant help to those affected the most by the opioid crisis in West Virginia,” Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said Monday. “We are still arguing our case in court involving Teva and Allergan, and my office is steadfast in holding everyone in the pharmaceutical supply chain accountable for their actions in causing this scourge in West Virginia.”
West Virginia, and all its cities and counties, will receive a $99 million lump-sum payment within 45 days of approval by the state’s political subdivisions.
Morrisey said the settlement amount with Janssen was considerably higher than what the state would have gotten in the massive 2021 national settlement, in which four drugmakers would pay a total of $26 billion to states and municipalities. West Virginia had opted out of that settlement agreement after finding out it would only be entitled to $48 million.
“I’ve always said that at the end of the day, through our office’s opioid work, West Virginia will have the highest per capita settlement results in the nation fighting for our people,” Morrisey said. “It was absolutely the correct decision to proceed to trial and double the amount of relief we can provide to our citizens.”
Over a quarter of a century has elapsed since the introduction of Purdue Pharma’s Oxycontin, which many addiction experts and activists consider to be the match that lit the powder keg. But a reckoning is underway for the powerful family behind Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers, who have been demonized as the faces and names of the opioid crisis. The family agreed in March to pay $6 billion to settle widespread litigation over its role in perpetuating the crisis.
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An earlier settlement reached in September last year was subsequently vacated in December by New York Judge Robert Drain, who is overseeing the company’s bankruptcy filing because it released members of the family from liability in civil opioid-related cases. The Sacklers had stipulated in the September agreement — which was overwhelmingly agreed to by state lawmakers, local leaders, tribes, and individuals — that they would pay $4.5 billion over nine years to the settlement fund in exchange for immunity in the wide range of civil lawsuits. The family maintains its innocence in worsening the public health crisis.
Nearly 500,000 people died due to opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2019. More than 100,000 people in the United States died from drug overdoses between May 2020 and April 2021 alone, which is the most ever recorded in a single year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People who become hooked on prescription opioids, often following a medical procedure, often shift to heroin or other synthetic opioids once they run out of pills. Synthetic opiates such as fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine, have caused overdoses to increase drastically since 2013, according to federal data.
