Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. has committed to settling a lawsuit connected to San Francisco’s opioid crisis by paying the city nearly $230 million, as announced in a press release on Wednesday by San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu.
According to the release, over the span of the next 14 years, Walgreens will provide $229.6 million, with a major portion of this amount being paid in the first eight years.
This agreement was reached nine months subsequent to U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer’s declaration that the drugstore chain could be held accountable for ‘significantly contributing’ to the opioid epidemic that has resulted in ‘widespread harm’ and constituted a public nuisance in the city. Walgreens was criticized by Breyer for a ’15-year failure’ in effectively monitoring opioid prescriptions to detect potential abuse of these potentially highly addictive substances.
Chiu lauded the settlement during a press conference as the most substantial awarded to a local government in recent years of nationwide opioid litigation. “The opioid crisis has brought immense pain and irreversible damage across the nation,” Chiu said. “San Francisco, like other cities, has carried a large part of the burden of the opioid crisis.”
He added that Walgreens’ conduct exacerbated the opioid problem in San Francisco and noted that no sum of money could compensate for the lives lost.
Walgreens, in a statement, contested liability and did not concede to any wrongdoing, stating that the settlement enables it to prioritize patients, customers, and communities. It expressed sympathy for those affected by the opioid crisis.
Judge Breyer’s ruling in August 2022 concluded that a profit-driven ‘fill, fill, fill’ mentality was prevalent in Walgreens’ dispensing of opioids. The judge noted that over 1.2 million opioid prescriptions, flagged for potential misuse, were received by Walgreens’ San Francisco pharmacies from 2006 to 2020. Yet, less than 5% of these were diligently examined before being dispensed.
The settlement reached with Walgreens prevents a trial to establish damages. San Francisco had earlier projected a cost of $8.1 billion to curb the opioid crisis and argued that Walgreens was legally responsible for the entire sum.
Last year, Walgreens reached a $683 million opioid settlement with Florida, an amount greater than what three-quarters of the $878 million agreed to be paid by four other corporations, including CVS Health Corp, in earlier similar settlements.
From 1999 to 2021, over 600,000 people in the United States succumbed to drug overdoses, with more than 107,000 of these deaths occurring in 2021 alone, as per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
