It seems like a long time ago, but the trial — the first statewide opioid trial in West Virginia’s history — involving three families of drug manufacturers for tremendous damage done to the Mountain State, has just concluded with record-breaking settlements.
Recently, I announced that our office had negotiated a $161.5 million plus settlement with two opioid drug manufacturers, Teva and Allergan. The cash value alone is put at $134 million over the terms of this agreement, including the settlement amount, attorney fees and other trial costs. This settlement is by far the largest per capita settlement in the nation for any previous Teva and Allergan cases.
In addition, Teva will supply $27 million worth of Narcan.
In April, we settled with Janssen and its subsidiary Johnson & Johnson for $99 million.
Since I have been Attorney General, West Virginia has been awarded $296.5 million in total opioid settlements from manufacturer related cases, including $10 million from McKinsey Pharmaceuticals, $26 million from Endo Pharmaceuticals, $99 million from Johnson & Johnson just announced in April, and now $161.5 million from Teva and Allergan.
Why are these settlements important to West Virginia?
We cannot bring back the lives lost to the opioid epidemic, but our efforts will allow the money to start coming in to address the underlying issues brought about by this menace. We can target resources to those who need it most.
The statistics behind the opioid epidemic are just staggering. For example, from 1999 to 2019, more than 10,000 people perished from this public health catastrophe. Sometimes the overdose death rate in our state was two times higher than the national average. In other years, West Virginia’s overdose rate was 25 percent higher than the second highest state.
This devastation spread across all 55 counties. As a result, there is hardly a family in the state that can’t tell a tale of woe related to opioid addiction.
Much of this devastation hurt our future generations, especially newborns. From 2008 to 2017, the Mountain State’s incidence of neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS, increased by a factor of five. We went from having 10.64 NAS babies per 1,000 births in 2008 to 56.17 per 1,000 births in 2017, which is far higher than the national average.
Approximately 40 percent of foster care placements in West Virginia are due to parental drug use, and some 34,000 children who reside here have a parent who is incarcerated because of some form of opioid related crime. The numbers don’t lie: 12.9 percent of prisoners have an opioid use disorder.
Perhaps this is because at the height of the opioid tsunami that hit West Virginia, news reports indicate, that enough pills flooded into the state to provide 433 painkillers for every man, woman and child residing in the state. Any reasonable person should be shocked by the sheer quantity of pills that overwhelmed us over a very short span of years.
No amount of money will bring back the lives lost. No amount of money will ever heal the wounds inflicted by this epidemic.
We can, however, have accountability. And this is an important step toward that goal.
Morrisey is West Virginia's attorney general.