"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 counties are Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Summit (Akron).
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 earlier; after the new settlements, the only defendant left is Walgreens. The current plan is for Walgreens and other pharmacies to go to trial within six months if it doesn't settle first, Smyth and Mulvihill report.
The trial was closely watched as a test of how well drug 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. "A federal judge in Ohio has been pushing the parties toward a settlement of all the lawsuits for nearly two years," AP reports. "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."
Attorneys general from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas, which are leading the talks, said that they're continuing the effort and that the Ohio settlement helps, AP reports.
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