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Walmart, CVS and Walgreens sentenced to pay 650 million dollars for the opioid crisis

2022-08-17T23:59:12.287Z


The sum will finance prevention programs and reimburse part of the expenses caused by the epidemic of overdose deaths in two Ohio counties


A federal judge in the state of Ohio (northern USA) has sentenced the large pharmacy chains Walmart, CVS and Walgreens to pay $650.6 million to two counties in that state as compensation for their role in the crisis. of opioids, the synthetic derivatives of opium prescribed as painkillers that caused the largest public health crisis in the country between AIDS and the coronavirus pandemic.

Judge Dan Polster has considered it proven that the action of these pharmacies helped create a "public harm" by ignoring the abusive consumption of these products by their customers in Lake and Trumbull counties.

The important sum will allow financing education and prevention programs and reimburse the agencies and organizations involved for the expenses incurred in managing the crisis, although it represents only a third of what both counties need to face the economic consequences of the epidemic. as explained by Polster and the law firm that represents the counties.

The rest of the civil liability must fall on the manufacturers and distributors.

Walmart, the largest retail chain in the country, has announced its intention to appeal the ruling, considering that the process has been "stuffed with legal and factual errors."

It also intends to use Walgreens.

The pharmacies, in any case, stress that their specialists did nothing more than follow the protocol initiated by the doctors,

who prescribe legal medicines approved by the health authorities.

All three companies are publicly traded.

Last summer, the aforementioned chains, plus Rite Aid, were ordered to pay 26 million dollars to two counties in the State of New York.

In the Ohio case, Rite Aid and another defendant chain reached financial settlements with counties to avoid going to trial.

A year ago, the giant Johnson & Johnson and three large distributors signed an agreement worth 26,000 million dollars with several States to settle thousands of lawsuits.

In other states, such as Oklahoma and California, by contrast, consideration of public harm as a result of opioid use did not benefit plaintiffs.

The three companies had been found guilty last November, considering that they issued these opioids massively in the two counties.

Over 20 years, between a minimum of 500,000 and 850,000 Americans, according to sources, died from an overdose of these highly addictive drugs whose use led in many cases to narcotics or fentanyl, another synthetic opioid much more powerful than morphine and with increased risk of dependence.

In any case, the dependency required the patient to exponentially increase the dose or resort to stronger remedies, in a spiral of endless destruction.

The rosary of deaths that the consumption of these legal painkillers left in its wake provoked a myriad of complaints from individuals, groups such as the Native American tribes, especially affected, counties and States.

In the crosshairs of all of them was the person most responsible for the crisis, Purdue Pharma, which with its drug Oxycontin (trademark in the US, based on the active principle of oxycodone) generalized the use and prescription of this type of pain relievers to treat chronic pain.

Purdue Pharma boasted at the time of having expanded the scope of action of this analgesic from the primary indication, the treatment of pain in cancer patients, to any type of patient with chronic pain, a market niche in which Oxycontin made its fortune.

Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, in its English acronym; federal health agency) nor City Councils such as the one in New York consider the crisis to be over.

In 2021, overdose deaths, which have increased sixfold since 1999, exceeded 100,000, the highest figure in history, according to CDC data.

Periodic public campaigns warn of the risk of consumption and in New York, for example, it is not uncommon to periodically receive postal information from the Department of Health on how to deal with an overdose to prevent it from being fatal or the resources available on the public network to unhook.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-08-17

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