SANTA FE, NM (AP) — New Mexico has reached a $500 million settlement with Walgreens over the pharmacy chain’s position in distributing extremely addictive prescription ache relievers.
The settlement was signed in March, and state officers confirmed a confidentiality clause within the settlement was lifted on Friday.
The settlement comes on prime of the $274 million settlements reached by Albertsons, CVS, Kroger and Walmart final fall. Prosecutors say the New Mexico opioid lawsuit has netted greater than $1 billion in whole.
They argued in court docket final 12 months that Walgreens failed to acknowledge suspicious prescriptions and refused to fill them.
“I’m optimistic it will assist struggle the opioid disaster and supply the remedy that New Mexicans so desperately want,” Luis Robles, one of many attorneys who labored on the case, advised Santa Fe New Mexican.
In recent times, drug producers, distributors, pharmacies and different corporations concerned within the opioid enterprise have reached settlements with native, state and tribal governments totaling greater than $50 billion.
In Might, West Virginia introduced its settlement with Kroger, taking that state’s whole opioid litigation to over $1 billion. The state of West Virginia has misplaced extra lives per capita to opioid overdoses than some other state.
The vast majority of the settlement funds from the opioid lawsuit have to be used to fight the disaster, which has been linked to greater than 560,000 deaths within the US over the previous 20 years, together with greater than 70,000 a 12 months most not too long ago.
In accordance with the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, most deaths in recent times have been attributed to fentanyl and different illicit artificial opioids, not prescription ache medicines.