North Carolina will get $750M in national $26B opioid settlement
Attorney General Josh Stein said Friday that North Carolina will get $750 million to fight the state's opioid crisis.
Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson and three other major U.S. distributors finalized nationwide settlements over their role in the opioid addiction crisis Friday, an announcement that clears the way for $26 billion to flow to nearly every state and local government in the U.S.
Defendants will start releasing funds to a national administrator on April 2, Stein said, and states and local governments should start receiving money in the second quarter of 2022.
“These companies made billions of dollars while millions of Americans got hooked on opioids," Stein said. "In North Carolina, we've already lost at least 20,000 people to this crisis, and countless families more have been devastated by loss and addiction."
As part of the settlement, Johnson & Johnson is required to stop selling opioids, not fund or provide grants to third parties for promoting opioids, not lobby on activities related to opioids and to share clinical trial data.
The Associated Press reports Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson announced the settlement plan last year, but the deal was contingent on getting participation from a critical mass of state and local governments.
While none of the settlement money will go directly to victims of opioid addiction or their survivors, the vast majority of it is required to be used to deal with the epidemic.
The amount sent to each state under the opioid settlement depends on a formula that takes into account the severity of the crisis and the population. A handful of states — Alabama, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Washington and West Virginia — have not joined all or part of the settlement, mostly because they have their own deals or are preparing for trial.
The crisis has deepened during the coronavirus pandemic, with U.S. opioid-related deaths reaching a high of more than 76,000 in the 12 months that ended in April 2021, largely because of the spread of fentanyl and other lab-made drugs. A recent report from a commission by The Lancet medical journal projected that 1.2 million Americans could die of opioid overdose between 2020 and 2029 without policy changes.
