COLUMBUS, Ohio—Ohio and more than 140 local governments in the state have finalized an $808 million-plus settlement with the nation’s three largest pharmaceutical distributors and drugmaker Johnson & Johnson to settle lawsuits related to the companies’ role in the opioid epidemic, Attorney General Dave Yost announced Thursday.
Ohio’s agreement is part of a larger $21 billion deal to settle lawsuits filed by more than 3,000 state and local governments against Johnson & Johnson, as well as drug distributors AmerisourceBergen, McKesson, and Columbus-based Cardinal Health.
The drug companies have been accused of helping to make and/or distribute billions of opioid painkiller pills in recent years despite knowing they were being abused by addicts.
Yost, a Columbus Republican, said during an online news conference that the money will be paid out over the next 18 years to help a state that has been ravaged in recent years by the crisis. Large numbers of people in Ohio and around the nation have become addicted to opioids via prescription pills, leading to thousands of overdose deaths per year in Ohio alone.
Under an agreement reached last year, 55% of Ohio’s settlement money will go to a foundation that will pay for addiction treatment programs. Another 30% will go to local governments; the remaining 15% will go to the state.
The companies also agreed to take a number of other steps to curb opioid abuse -- including detecting, prohibiting and reporting suspicious orders from pharmacies, as well as sharing information about opioid distribution with each other and with government regulators to ensure no communities are over-saturated with pills.
Johnson & Johnson, which previously sold the raw material used in opioids as well as some pills, agreed to pay $5 billion over 9 years and not to manufacture any opioids for the next decade.
Yost announced the settlement after a number of local governments scrambled to ratify the deal in recent weeks. The AG warned last month that unless at least 95% of local governments involved in the legal action agreed to the settlement, it would fall through.
In the end, every local government litigant but one signed onto the deal – Scioto County, whose leaders decided the $1.8 million the county stood to get under the settlement wasn’t enough given that no area of the nation has been hit harder by the opioid crisis.
Between 1999 and 2019, overdoses from prescription opioids more than quadrupled nationwide, causing the deaths of nearly 247,000 people during that time, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The opioid crisis also cost the U.S. economy an estimated $631 billion between 2015 and 2018 alone, a study found.
The three distributors, along with Johnson & Johnson and a number of other drugmakers and distributors, previously agreed to pay Cuyahoga and Summit counties more than $100 million each to settle opioid litigation.
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