The State of Alaska filed a complaint and consent judgment Thursday against chain pharmacy CVS to close out the settlement process that began two years ago involving the opioid crisis in Alaska.
Once the settlement is final, the State will receive about $10 million over 10 years from CVS Pharmacy, Inc., or nearly $1 million a year for a decade.
“I am glad CVS Pharmacy has stepped forward and chosen to settle with the State of Alaska,” said Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor. “I am hopeful that the series of opioid litigations that the State has engaged in will help prevent tragedies like this one in the future.”
CVS is just one company that the State has settled with in ongoing legal disputes over Alaska’s opioid crisis. In February 2021, the State finalized a settlement with the manufacturer Janssen/Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and three major pharmaceutical distributors: Amerisource Bergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson. In Dec. 2022 a Department of Law news release laid out three multi-state settlements with opioid manufacturers and a chain pharmacy relating to the opioid crisis, including Walmart, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Allergan. Shortly thereafter, the State entered into settlement with Walgreens. All of these settlements amount to approximately $99 million coming into the state over the next 10 to 15 years.
Between 2010 to 2017, Alaska received 303,646,336 retail doses of prescription opioid painkillers. With Alaska’s population of 721,000 residents, this equates to roughly 420 doses per Alaskan. According to the State in its legal filings, these numbers alone should have put pharmacies and distributors on notice that there were too many opioids flooding the Alaska market, and the companies should have reported suspicious orders as required by law.
Thursday’s complaint lays out how CVS allegedly dispensed opioids without first making sufficient inquiries into the legitimacy of the prescription, implemented policies in which its pharmacists were given insufficient time and resources to practice their corresponding responsibility, resulting in pharmacists too often ignoring or insufficiently investigating the red flags.
CVS states that it is consenting to this Consent Judgment solely for the purpose of effectuating the Agreement, and nothing contained herein may be taken as or construed to be an admission or concession of any violation of law.
Year after year as opioid dispensing increased and the opioid crisis grew, Defendant’s pharmacists failed to practice their corresponding responsibility, including dispensing opioids without first resolving the red flags presented by suspicious prescriptions.
Through its actions and inactions in connection with the dispensing of opioids, including those alleged above, Defendant materially contributed to the creation of an opioid addiction crisis that has injured, harmed, and otherwise disrupted the lives of thousands of residents of the State of Alaska, as well as cost state and municipal governments billions of dollars in expenditures to prevent, mitigate, and remedy the multitude of different societal harms and injuries caused by the addiction crisis.”
While prescription opioids were the primary reason for opioid overdose deaths beginning in the late 1990s, heroin and then illegally-manufactured synthetic opioids became additional drivers of overdose deaths starting around 2010.
In 2021, Alaska lost at least 253 people to overdose, with 196 deaths attributed to opioid overdose. Seventy-six percent of the deaths, or 150, involved synthetic narcotics, a category that includes fentanyl, according to an executive summary in a report by the Governor’s Advisory Council on Opioid Remediation. The report provides a framework for allocation of settlement funds for opioid remediation.
Original source can be found here.