Walgreens, Walmart, and CVS pharmacies will compensate two Ohio counties a total of $650.6 million for damage caused by the opioid epidemic, a judge ordered Wednesday.
Trumbull County will receive $344.4 million over the next 15 years, and Lake County will receive $306.2 million, U.S. federal Judge Dan Polster said in a 76-page opinion after the pharmacies saw a high number of prescriptions for Oxycontin and Oxycodone, which are considered addictive opioids.
OHIO GROUP FILES TWO LAWSUITS OVER OPIOID SETTLEMENT DISTRIBUTION FOUNDATION
The order also requires the pharmacies to implement multiple safeguards against overprescribing opioids, according to Cleveland.com.
The sentence came after a jury in Cleveland ruled against the pharmacies last fall, claiming the pharmacies provided an oversupply of addictive painkillers that slipped into the black market. A hearing for exactly how much would be owed to the counties occurred in the spring.
Attorneys for both companies have previously said they plan to appeal the case, according to the outlet.
A federal judge in California issued a similar ruling against Walgreens last week, claiming the corporation’s pharmacy failed to catch hundreds of thousands of red flags, thereby violating the federal Controlled Substances Act.
“Walgreens pharmacies in San Francisco dispensed hundreds of thousands of red flag opioid prescriptions without performing adequate due diligence,” U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said last week, according to CTV News. “Tens of thousands of these prescriptions were written by doctors with suspect prescribing patterns. The evidence showed that Walgreens did not provide its pharmacists with sufficient time, staffing, or resources to perform due diligence on these prescriptions.”
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Monetary damages will be determined at a future hearing. The date of the hearing has not been set. Other pharmacies were also sued, but those pharmacies agreed to a settlement with the city for a total of $114 million, according to the outlet.
The opioid epidemic has caused more than 500,000 overdose deaths in the United States over two decades, government data show, leading to more than 3,000 lawsuits against drugmakers, distributors, and pharmacy chains.
