"Unspeakable human suffering: Maricopa County approves landmark national opioid settlement", 20 Oct 2021

Maricopa County has signed off, after more than seven years of litigating, on a national opioid settlement expected to infuse about $80 million in relief money to county residents.

The funds are restricted, meaning they will go directly to relief and resources related to opioids, including to diversion programs to prevent people from going to prison for an addiction or substance-use disorder, county officials said Wednesday morning.

Throwing money at a problem won't just fix it, but it gets the community on a journey closer to healing from the devastation caused by opioids…

The overall settlement money to Arizona is about $550 million, with about $80 million going directly to Maricopa County…

The landmark global settlement agreement was with opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and the “Big Three” drug distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson.

Maricopa County was one of thousands of communities that sued, arguing that taxpayers and communities were forced to bear the costs of the opioid crisis while opioid manufacturers, distributors, and dispensers put profits ahead of health and safety.

The turning point in the case was when a federal judge in Ohio forced pharmaceutical companies to share all their data with the plaintiffs during discovery…

The One Arizona Settlement Memorandum of Understanding says 44% of all opioid settlement funds will go to the state and 56% will go to participating local governments…

Preliminary 2020 numbers from the state Health Department presented at the Arizona Drug Summit on Sept. 14, 2020, showed that opioid overdose deaths through the end of April 2020 were up by 38% when compared with the number of fatal opioid overdoses during the same time period in 2019.