EDITORIAL: Settlement should remind us not to repeat deadly mistakes

EDITORIAL

There’s a well-trod narrative which maps the nation’s opioid crisis. It began in the late 1990s as drugmakers flooded the U.S. healthcare system with painkillers, assuring prescribers that, though powerful, the drugs weren’t highly addictive.

That was a lie.

Before long, millions of Americans from all walks of life were becoming addicted to the very medications they’d been told were safe. A black market rose to satiate the growing number of addicts, who often turned to heroin or counterfeit drugs made overseas and laced with highly lethal fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.

Overdoses and crime rates skyrocketed; so did social-emotional behavioral issues in schools, as the next generation was affected either in the womb or the home as opioid addiction ravaged bodies and families alike.

Individuals sued drugmakers. Those lawsuits failed. Class-action suits followed, but again, the drug companies successfully argued that it was the patient, not the drugmaker, who was at fault because they did not heed doctors’ orders.

By the mid-2010s, state governments began filing lawsuits on behalf of the people, and the tide changed. Counties and states won sizable lawsuits and an ever-growing tsunami of legal filings across the country continued to put pressure on McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, Endo, Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Walgreens and Henry Schein to give back at least some small share of the billions made in drug sales. Mallinckrodt Plc and Purdue Pharma would file for bankruptcy and become tangled in bankruptcy lawsuits.

The opioid litigation remains messy and far-reaching, unlike the $246-billion settlement big tobacco paid in the late 1990s. Yet there is good news: Some of the money from a $26-billion settlement will make its way to Ventura County and the City of Moorpark.

Following a settlement agreement between numerous state and local government entities and pharmaceutical distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, as well as drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, California will receive a maximum of $2.3 billion.

A complicated set of formulas will determine how much makes its way into local coffers. Those figures won’t be fully known anytime soon.

What is known is that the money will be used for addiction treatment services, including court diversion programs, homelessness and other health-related programs.

The money will be a fraction of what a generation of opioid addiction has cost our justice, healthcare and school systems. And we are far from out of the woods.

While much blame was placed on big pharma, people are turning their attention to a healthcare system that, for a variety of reasons, wasn’t equipped to handle an opioid epidemic, a problem made worse by a pandemic.

History has a way of repeating itself. This is not the first opioid crisis our country has faced. We believe it won’t be the last.

But perhaps, if we can collectively recognize the mistakes made over the past 30 years—the lack of government regulation, the inequities in healthcare and the unbridled greed of drugmakers—the true payoff will be our ability to avoid this type of self-made health crisis in the future.