Alabama reached a $276 million settlement with companies that produce and distribute opioids over their role in the overdose epidemic.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced on Tuesday that Endo Pharmaceuticals, which produced generic opioid medications, will pay the state $25 million. Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson will pay the state $70.3 million this year, and opioid distributor McKesson will pay $141 million over nine years. On top of that, the state collected an additional $40 million in attorneys fees.
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Marshall is a first-hand witness to the devastating effects of opioid addiction, having watched his wife Bridgette suffer dependence on the drugs for years following an initial prescription to deal with migraines. She died by suicide in 2018.
“Having encountered the utter darkness of the opioid crisis at my own doorstep, this is one of my most meaningful accomplishments as your Attorney General,” Marshall said.
The settlement in Alabama comes just one day after West Virginia reached a settlement of $99 million with Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals over its role in flooding the state with opioids. The settlement amount with Janssen was considerably higher than what West Virginia 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 backed out of the settlement after learning it would only be entitled to $48 million.
Alabama also backed out of the $26 billion settlement, choosing instead to pursue separate legal action that would garner more funding to help alleviate the significant damage caused by the overdose crisis in the state. Alabama has been especially wracked by the drug companies’ practices of marketing the pills aggressively and allegedly downplaying their addictiveness.
“These three settlement agreements affirm my decision to decline participation in the national opioid settlements, which did not adequately acknowledge the unique harm that Alabamians have endured and would have redirected millions of dollars to bigger states that experienced a less severe impact,” Marshall said.
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Alabama had the highest rates of opioid prescriptions in the country in 2017. Alabama healthcare providers wrote almost three times as many prescriptions for opioids per person as those in the lowest prescribing state, Hawaii.
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.
