Payments to begin for companies in opioid settlement

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Washington’s attorney general said that starting Dec. 1, more than half a billion dollars will be paid out to local governments that have struggled to deal with the opioid crisis.

His announcement came on Monday morning after Attorney General Bob Ferguson came to a resolution with several large opioid distributors. He laid out the amounts that will be going to the state and other locales.

The announcement came nearly a year after Ferguson took three large opioid distributors to trial. They were ultimately required to pay Washington state $518 million.

Ferguson said the majority of that money will go toward fighting the opioid epidemic in the state and will be divided between 125 local governments. He said the state government alone will get a total of $261 million.

In July, the King County Council declared fentanyl a public health crisis. The council made the declaration after learning that the number of deaths from fentanyl overdoses in King County more than doubled in 2021, and in 2022, the county is still on track to set another record for overdoses.

Fentanyl use is a direct outgrowth of the opioid crisis and Ferguson said the funds from the drug companies will only be used to deal with the opioid situation in Washington and cannot be used for other purposes.

Ferguson said he had the choice to join a national settlement that was agreed to by attorneys general across the country, but his office declined to do so and instead went to trial.

He said doing so allowed the office to get tens of millions more dollars for Washington state.

“Half a billion dollars is a lot of money, but there is no amount of money that we could bring back from this litigation that would bring back the lives that have been lost because of the opioid epidemic in Washington state. I think that’s something each of us feels acutely and still feels as we’re facing it today,” said Ferguson.

Ferguson said King County will get $56 million from the funds, followed by Pierce County, which will receive $26 million, and Snohomish County will receive a little more than $25 million.

The AG’s office said the money will be paid out over a period of 17 years.

One of the distributors, the McKesson Corporation, posted a statement in May when Ferguson highlighted the resolution.

It read in part:

”While the companies strongly dispute the allegations made in the plaintiffs’ complaints and during trial, they believe that resolving all of the litigation filed by the State of Washington and its political subdivisions will further the companies’ goal of achieving broad resolution of governmental opioid ... while delivering meaningful relief to communities across the United States that have been impacted by the opioid epidemic.”

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