Kroger to pay $110 million to resolve Kentucky lawsuit over opioid epidemic By Reuters

By Nate Raymond (NS:)

(Reuters) -Kroger has agreed to pay $110 million to resolve a lawsuit by the state of Kentucky alleging the grocery retailer chain’s pharmacies helped gasoline a deadly opioid epidemic by flooding its communities with a complete lot of hundreds and hundreds of doses of addictive painkillers.

The settlement was launched on Thursday by Kentucky Authorized skilled Fundamental Russell Coleman, whose state had opted to not participate in a broader $1.4-billion deal Kroger (NYSE:) finalized last yr that resolved associated claims by 30 states along with counties, municipalities and Native American tribes.

In a lawsuit filed in state courtroom docket in February, Coleman had alleged that Kroger’s better than 100 Kentucky pharmacies had been accountable for over 11% of all opioid medication distributed inside the state from 2006 to 2019, or about 444 million opioid doses. 

The lawsuit alleged Kroger should have recognized based totally on the suspiciously extreme numbers and completely different crimson flags that the treatment have been being diverted for illicit features, and will have taken measures to stop shipments and refuse to fill suspicious prescriptions.

Instead, Kroger continued to ship giant parts of opioids all by means of the state, didn’t report suspicious orders to authorities and continued to dispense addictive treatment at “alarming” expenses in Kentucky, which was hard-hit by the drug-addiction epidemic, in step with the lawsuit.

“This massive grocery chain that requested for our perception and our enterprise allowed the fireside of behavior to unfold all through the commonwealth, leaving ache and leaving loads brokenness in its aftermath,” Coleman talked about at a press conference.

The Cincinnati-based grocery retailer chain, whose $25-billion proposed merger with rival Albertsons (NYSE:) was terminated after courts blocked the deal last month, talked about in an announcement it hoped the settlement funds can be utilized to battle opioid abuse in Kentucky.

The company didn’t admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement and Kroger generally known as the claims that it didn’t have inside teaching or guardrails spherical filling prescriptions for opioids “patently false.”

In response to the settlement settlement, Kentucky acquired a substantial premium above what it may need acquired had it joined the earlier broader settlement with Kroger. Had it carried out so, Kentucky would have recovered $66.6 million.

Drug producers, distributors, pharmacy operators and others have agreed to pay about $50 billion to resolve lawsuits and investigations by states and native governments over their roles inside the drug-overdose epidemic.

Virtually 727,000 of us inside the U.S. died from opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2022, in step with the U.S. Services for Sickness Administration and Prevention.