Global Courant 2023-05-18 09:15:22
Walgreens has agreed to pay nearly $230 million to San Francisco to settle claims that the pharmacy giant fueled the opioid epidemic that has plagued the city for decades.
The settlement, which will be paid out over 15 years, follows a federal judge’s finding last year that the drugstore chain dispensed hundreds of thousands of “red flag” prescription drugs without an investigation.
The payout, which city officials said will include $57 million in its first year, will be “dedicated to restoring San Francisco’s opioid epidemic,” city attorneys wrote in a lawsuit Wednesday.
In a statementSan Francisco Mayor London Breed said the money will go to programs that include “treatment beds, dual diagnosis beds, abstinence-based programming and transitional housing.”
“While we are grateful for the funding secured in this lawsuit, it will not replace the thousands of lives lost to the opioid epidemic unfolding in our country,” Breed said. “Lives are being destroyed, especially with the rise of fentanyl, and cities are having to respond to what is a generational crisis.”
A Walgreens spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
San Francisco filed the public nuisance lawsuit in 2018. Last year, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer wrote in a 112-page op-ed that Walgreens dispensed hundreds of thousands of opioid prescriptions from 2006 to 2020 without proper scrutiny.
Tens of thousands were written by doctors with “suspicious prescribing patterns,” and Walgreens didn’t give its pharmacists enough time or resources to review them, Breyer wrote.
“As a result of Walgreens’ 15-year failure to conduct adequate due diligence, the plaintiff proved more likely than not that Walgreens pharmacies dispensed large volumes of medically illegal opioid prescriptions that were diverted for illicit use, substantially contributing to the opioid epidemic in San Francisco,” Breyer wrote.
Breyer found that opioid-related emergency room visits spiked in the city, more than tripling from 886 in 2015 to 2,998 in 2020. And since 2016, he wrote, opioid overdoses have been the leading cause of death among homeless people in San Francisco.
Following last year’s ruling, a Walgreens spokesperson said the company was disappointed with the decision and planned to appeal.
“As we’ve said throughout this process, we never made or marketed opioids, nor did we distribute them to the ‘pill mills’ and Internet pharmacies that fueled this crisis,” Walgreens spokesman Fraser Engerman said at the time.
