Washington Rejects 'Insufficient' $527M Opioid Lawsuit Settlement

OLYMPIA, WA — Washington's Attorney General has rejected a $527.5 million proposal to settle state lawsuits levied against several opioid distributors for their part in fueling the opioid epidemic.

The settlement, proposed by defendants McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, and Johnson & Johnson, would have given the state the $527.5 million over 18 years, but only on the condition that every Washington jurisdiction agree to drop their individual lawsuits against the opioid distributors.

Washington state filed its suit against McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen in 2019 and a second against Johnson & Johnson in early 2020, but a number of Washington counties and cities have filed independent lawsuits as well — all of which would need to be dropped for the full settlement to go through.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson has announced he has formally rejected the deal. Ferguson argues that, not only do Washingtonians deserve their day in court, but the roughly $30 million a year the settlement would provide is not enough to undo the damage the opioid epidemic has caused the Evergreen State.

“The settlement is, to be blunt, not nearly good enough for Washington,” Ferguson said. “It stretches woefully insufficient funds into small payments over nearly 20 years, to be shared among more than 300 Washington jurisdictions. We are looking forward to walking into a Washington state courtroom to hold these companies accountable for their conduct."

New York's Attorney General recently signed a $1.1 billion settlement with McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen. Ferguson also points to a similar lawsuit from the state of Oklahoma, which won a $465 million verdict from Johnson & Johnson alone — four times what the company would have paid Washington through the proposed settlement.

Ferguson's lawsuit against McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen alleges the three companies made billions by exploiting opioid addiction, shipping large amounts of oxycodone, fentanyl, hydrocodone and other prescription drugs to Washington, despite knowing that they would likely go to drug dealers or addicts. The Attorrney General's Office says that, by tracking shipping data, it found between 250,000 to a million suspicious orders of opioids that the three companies sent into Washington between 2006 and 2014.

The state's suit against Johnson & Johnson alleges the company helped fuel the epidemic through deceptive marketing and underplaying opioid's addictive qualities.

At the peak of the opioid epidemic in 2011, Washingtonians had been prescribed a combined 112 million daily doses of opioids — 16 opioids for every person in the state. In 2015, Asotin, Clallam, Grays Harbor, Columbia, Garfield, Pend Orielle, Lewis and Benton Counties had more opioid prescriptions than living people, the AGO said.

The Attorney General has promised to reject any proposal that does not offer "transformative change" in Washington's response to the opioid crisis, and that all money earned through the lawsuit will go directly to addressing drug abuse and addiction.

Ferguson says opioid manufacturers cannot be let off the hook for such outrageous over prescription, and for the 8,000 Washingtonians who died of opioid overdoses between 2006 and 2017.

"Washington families devastated by the opioid epidemic deserve their day in court," said Ferguson. "We intend to give it to them.”