New York District Attorney James said the companies “have fanned the flames of the opiate crisis for more than two decades.” “While no amount of money can ever make up for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and millions of addiction cases, we can do everything we can to prevent this kind of despair in the future,” she says.
4000 lawsuits
Pharmaceutical Johnson & Johnson – now much in the news with the Janssen vaccine against the coronavirus – would pay out a total of 5 billion dollars with this proposal. McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, which are responsible for supplying the majority of addictive drugs to pharmacies, account for the remaining 21 billion.
In contrast to the payment of the money, the affected states will stop the almost 4000 lawsuits about this. Also in the future, they would not be able to take up those cases if they agree to the settlement.
Easier controls
Johnson & Johnson was mainly accused by states and municipalities that the company downplayed the addiction risk of the substances to doctors and users. The complaint about the other companies was in particular that they had lax controls, which also led to the substances ending up illegally on a large scale.
Part of the settlement proposal is therefore a new control mechanism, whereby the pharmaceutical companies also check each other’s deliveries and report on them. The intention is that the alarm can be raised when remarkably large orders of addictive drugs are placed, so that they find their way into the illegal circuit less easily.
In a joint statement, the companies emphasize that they reject all allegations. They do say that the settlement is an important step in finding a solution to this addiction problem. New York Public Prosecutor James is disappointed that the companies are not doing their own thing.
–
