2023-05-18 21:46:16
Overdoses from synthetic drugs such as fentanyl have killed 2,300 people since 2020 in the Californian city
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. It’s about a historical 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 billion and with 8,721 pharmacies across 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 dollars is scheduled for June 2024, as confirmed by david chiu, San Francisco Attorney General. The rest will be paid over eight years, some funds that will go directly to the fight against an epidemic that does not seem to have reached its peak. Only in the first three months of the year, overdose deaths are up 41% in San Francisco, without a clear explanation of the reason for the escalation.
It is a phenomenon that the world’s leading power has been suffering for decades. If 20 years ago the deaths were 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). That is every five minutes a person dies from an opioid overdose in the first world power.
“Opiates have wreaked havoc on our nation, causing immense suffering and untold damage,” Chiu said after making the deal official. For her part, the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, applauded the efforts of Chiu and his team during a case “to help us continue to deal with the devastating impact that opioids are having on our city and our county.”
The lawsuit was not only against Walgreens. In 2018 San Francisco took legal action against distributors, dispensaries and pharmacists, 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 opiate legal case.
According to Judge Charles Breyer, the Illinois-based chain is responsible for a significant part 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.
“They were more concerned with profit than with complying with their legal obligations,” Chiu pointed out. “They didn’t give their pharmacists time to do due diligence, putting pressure on their pharmacists to dispense, dispense, dispense.”
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