SANTA FE, NM (AP) — New Mexico has reached a $500 million agreement with Walgreens over the pharmacy chain’s role in distributing highly addictive prescription pain relievers.
The agreement was signed in March, and state officials confirmed a confidentiality clause in the agreement was lifted on Friday.
The settlement comes on top of the $274 million settlements reached by Albertsons, CVS, Kroger and Walmart last fall. Prosecutors say the New Mexico opioid lawsuit has netted more than $1 billion in total.
They argued in court last year that Walgreens failed to recognize suspicious prescriptions and refused to fill them.
“I’m optimistic this will help fight the opioid crisis and provide the treatment that New Mexicans so desperately need,” Luis Robles, one of the attorneys who worked on the case, told Santa Fe New Mexican.
In recent years, drug manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and other companies involved in the opioid business have reached settlements with local, state and tribal governments totaling more than $50 billion.
In May, West Virginia announced its settlement with Kroger, taking that state’s total opioid litigation to over $1 billion. The state of West Virginia has lost more lives per capita to opioid overdoses than any other state.
The majority of the settlement funds from the opioid lawsuit must be used to combat the crisis, which has been linked to more than 560,000 deaths in the US over the past two decades, including more than 70,000 a year most recently.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most deaths in recent years have been attributed to fentanyl and other illicit synthetic opioids, not prescription pain medications.