"The nation's three biggest drug distributors and a major drugmaker reached a $260 million settlement with two Ohio counties over the deadly havoc wreaked by opioids, just hours before the first federal trial over the crisis was about to begin Monday," Julie Carr Smyth and Geoff Mulvihill report for The Associated Press. The trial involved Cuyahoga and Summit counties.
The agreement requires distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson to pay a combined $215 million. Drug manufacturer Teva must pitch in $20 million in cash and $25 million worth of Suboxone, an opioid-addiction treatment drug. Five other drugmakers had settled in the case earlier; after this newest wave of settlements, the only defendant left is Walgreens. The current plan is for Walgreens and other pharmacies to go to trial within six months if they don't settle first, Smyth and Mulvihill report.
The trial was closely watched as a test of how well pharmaceutical companies' arguments would go over in similar cases; the drug industry is embroiled in more than 2,600 lawsuits from state, local and tribal governments nationwide. "A federal judge in Ohio has been pushing the parties toward a settlement of all the lawsuits for nearly two years," Smyth and Mulvihill report. "Industry CEOs and attorneys general from four states met Friday in a daylong session in Cleveland, where the offer in place was a deal worth potentially $48 billion in cash and drugs over time to settle cases nationally. But they couldn't close the deal, partly because of disagreements between state and local governments over how to allocate the settlement, which would have come from the three big distributors, Teva and Johnson & Johnson."
The attorneys general from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas, which are leading the talks, said in a statement that they're continuing the effort and that the Ohio settlement helps, Smyth and Mulvihill report.
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/33OuyKj Major pharmaceutical companies settle for $260 million in Ohio opioid suit just as first federal trial was about to begin - Entrepreneur Generations
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