Walgreens to pay SF record-breaking $230 million to fight drug crisis
San Francisco will be paid nearly $230 million as a result of a historic opioid lawsuit settlement it reached with Walgreens, an infusion of funding that will help the city fight its devastating drug crisis.
The city will receive settlement funds over a 14-year period, with the first $57 million due by June 2024, City Attorney David Chiu said Wednesday. Most of the settlement — $175 million — will be paid out within eight years, officials said.
“Opioids have wreaked havoc across our nation leading to immense suffering and untold damage,” Chiu said in a statement.
About $29 million from the settlement will pay the city’s legal fees for various private law firms who represented the city in the litigation.
Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors will determine how exactly to spend the remaining settlement funds. But Chiu’s office said the money would be used to address the city’s opioid crisis, which has worsened in recent years as the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl has taken hold among drug users. About 2,300 people in San Francisco have died of drug overdoses since 2020, nearly double the death toll the city has seen from COVID-19. Overdoses shot up 41% in the first three months of this year alone, and officials still don’t know exactly why.
Breed in a statement thanked Chiu and his deputies for “the incredible work as part of this groundbreaking lawsuit.”
“Their relentless fight in our national crisis of opioid addiction deserves our thanks and more importantly, will help us to continue our work to address the devastating impacts opioids have had on our City and our Country,” Breed said.
San Francisco got the settlement after suing opioid manufacturers, distributors and dispensers in 2018. By the end of last year, Walgreens was the only defendant that had not yet settled with the city. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled in August that the corporate pharmacy chain could be held responsible for much of the city’s severe opioid epidemic.
Chiu said Wednesday that the $230 million settlement is the largest that any city has ever received from a single company as a result of opioid litigation. West Virginia, by comparison, settled with Walgreens for $83 million, though it had secured a total of more than $950 million from all opioid lawsuits, the Associated Press reported in January. San Francisco’s opioid lawsuit settlements from all parties, including Walgreens, now total about $350 million.
If San Francisco had not sued Walgreens on its own and instead relied on a national opioid lawsuit settlement with the company, the city’s share would have been about $15 million, according to Chiu — 15 times less than the settlement it reached.
“There is no amount of money that will bring back the lives that we have lost due to this epidemic,” Chiu said in a news conference on the steps of City Hall. “We mourn our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers. But one thing that we can do as lawyers is to fight for justice to ensure that those who cause harm are held accountable.”
Breyer, the federal judge, found that between 2006 and 2020, Walgreens distributed more than 100 million prescription opioid pills but didn’t do enough to flag suspicious prescriptions or prevent the pills from being used in illegal and harmful ways.
“They were more concerned with profit than following their legal obligations,” Chiu said. “They did not give their pharmacists time to conduct due diligence — pressuring their pharmacists to fill, fill, fill.”
Walgreens in a statement issued by a spokesperson said that it still disputes liability and did not admit any fault in the settlement agreement.
“We never manufactured or marketed opioids, nor did we distribute them to ‘“pill mills’” and internet pharmacies,” the company said. “The settlement allows us to focus on our mission of reimagining healthcare and wellbeing for our patients, customers, and communities. Our thoughts are with those impacted by this tragic crisis.”
Aside from its legal fees, San Francisco is required to spend the settlement funds on improving the opioid crisis, but the city has a lot of discretion to decide exactly what that looks like.
Breed said in her statement that she thinks the money can help the city expand programs that offer “solutions that we know are working,” including drug treatment beds, dual diagnosis beds for people with substance use and mental health issues, abstinence-focused programs and transitional housing. The mayor said she would provide more details when she submits her next budget proposal due in the coming weeks.
Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin said he wants the Walgreens settlement to pay for more street medicine teams — medical professionals who can evaluate drug users and get them into treatment beds.
“We need feet on the street,” he said. “We don’t have enough of them. We don’t have them on enough hours of the day … I agree that adding capacity is important, but filling the unused capacity that we already have should be issue No. 1.”
Peskin said he would seek to convene discussions with Breed, departments in her administration and the board about how to spend the settlement proceeds effectively.
“I don’t want this to be a free for all,” he said. “I want there to be accountability. I want there to be transparency. This is one of San Francisco’s most challenging issues, and I think that there’s a big opportunity with this money, but we have to see results, and we have to make it work.”
Reach J.D. Morris: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @thejdmorris
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
