Walgreens Pharmacy Chain Will Pay $230 Million To San Francisco For Fostering The Opioid Crisis

The Walgreens pharmacy chain will pay $230 million to the city of San Francisco for its role in the opioid crisis that claims the lives of thousands of people in the United States every year.. This is a historic agreement to try to stop a situation that has killed more than 2,300 people since 2020 in the Californian city, almost double the deaths left by the pandemic.

Walgreens, a giant valued at almost 27,000 million dollars and with 8,721 pharmacies throughout the country, reached the agreement nine months after a federal judge found it guilty of having dispensed thousands of drugs with prescriptions of dubious origin and that in many cases led to overdoses and accidental deaths.

The first payment of $57 million is scheduled for June 2024, San Francisco Attorney General David Chiu confirmed.. The rest will be paid over eight years, funds that will go directly to the fight against an epidemic that does not seem to have reached its peak. In the first three months of the year alone, overdose deaths have increased 41% in San Francisco, with no clear explanation as to why the escalation.

It is a phenomenon that the world's leading power has been suffering for decades. If 20 years ago the death toll was around 16,000 a year, 2020 closed with 68,000 and 2021 far exceeded it: 107,000 victims, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).. In other words, every five minutes a person dies from an opiate overdose in the world's leading power.

“Opioids have wreaked havoc on our nation, causing immense suffering and untold damage,” Chiu said after making the deal official.. For her part, San Francisco Mayor London Breed applauded the efforts of Chiu and her team during a case “that will help us continue to address the devastating impact opioids have on our city and county.”

The lawsuit was not only against Walgreens. In 2018 San Francisco took legal action against distributors, dispensaries and pharmaceutical companies, although Walgreens was the only party to the litigation that had not yet reached a settlement, sentenced to pay the highest amount to a city or state in an opioid legal case.

According to Judge Charles Breyer, the Illinois-based chain is responsible for a significant portion of San Francisco's drug crises.. Between 2006 and 2020 they distributed more than 100 million painkillers with “suspicious prescriptions” and did nothing to verify that there was a doctor behind them.

“They were more concerned with profit than with complying with their legal obligations,” Chiu said.. “They didn't give their pharmacists time to do due diligence, putting pressure on their pharmacists to dispense, dispense, dispense.”