Kentucky will receive $110 million to settle its lawsuit accusing one of the nation’s largest grocery chains of helping fuel the opioid epidemic, the state's attorney general said Thursday.
The state will use the money it is getting in its settlement with The Kroger Co. to combat an addiction that has ravaged communities and given the state some of the nation’s highest overdose death rates.
“This massive grocery chain that asked for our trust and our business allowed the fire of addiction to spread across the commonwealth, leaving pain and leaving so much brokenness in its aftermath,” Attorney General Russell Coleman said in announcing the settlement.
With Kentucky putting the settlement money toward prevention and recovery efforts, the company has "agreed to become part of the solution,” the Republican attorney general added.
Coleman's office sued Ohio-based Kroger last February, claiming its pharmacies helped fuel the opioid crisis. The suit, filed in state court, alleged that Kroger accumulated about 444 million doses of opioids to distribute in Kentucky between 2006 and 2019, amounting to 11% of all opioid pills sold in the state during that time.
“But most shockingly, there was ... no internal, serious system in place at Kroger to track or report suspicious activities,” Coleman said Thursday. "No trainings for staff. No guidelines to prevent abuse."
Kroger, a leading grocery chain in Kentucky, said in a statement Thursday that it hopes the settlement funds are used to combat opioid abuse. The company pushed back against the allegations that it lacked training or guardrails for filling opioid prescriptions, calling the accusations “patently false.”
The company said it has “long provided associates throughout the pharmacy with robust training, as well as tools to assist pharmacists in their professional judgment.”
Thousands of state and local governments across the country have sued drugmakers, distribution companies, pharmacies and others over the toll of the opioid epidemic.
The lawsuits assert that the companies promoted drugs as nonaddictive and didn’t exert enough control as they were shipped. At their peak during the coronavirus pandemic, the class of drugs was linked to more than 80,000 U.S. deaths per year. By then, the biggest killer was illicit fentanyl laced into many illegal drugs, rather than pills.
Drug overdose deaths in Kentucky fell by nearly 10% in 2023, marking a second straight annual decline. But the fight against addiction is far from over, state leaders say, attributing the progress to a comprehensive response that includes treatment and prevention as well as illegal drug seizures by law enforcement. Even though the death toll declined, nearly 2,000 Kentuckians died from drug overdoses in 2023.
Kroger agreed in 2023 to settle other lawsuits over the U.S. opioid crisis. As part of that deal, it agreed to pay up to $1.2 billion to state and local governments. Kentucky chose not to participate in the multistate legal action and that strategy paid off, Coleman said Thursday.
“If we would have joined the multistate settlement ... Kentucky would have brought home close to $50 million,” Coleman said, less than half the amount the state is receiving from its own lawsuit.
Meanwhile, government lawsuits against pharmacy benefit managers are seen as the latest frontier — and maybe the last big one — in years of litigation over the opioid-related drug epidemic in the U.S. Coleman has sued pharmacy benefit managers OptumRx and Express Scripts.
Pharmacy benefit managers run prescription drug coverage for health insurers and employers that provide coverage. They help decide which drugs make a plan’s formulary, or list of covered medications. They also can determine where patients go to fill their prescriptions.
A series of Kentucky attorneys general from both political parties — including now-Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat — aggressively pursued legal action against companies that make or distribute opioid-based medication.
In the Kroger settlement, about $18 million will cover lawyers' fees and costs, based on state law and terms of the deal. The remainder will support efforts to combat opioid addiction.
Half of Kentucky’s opioid settlement funds will go directly to cities and counties. A state commission will distribute the rest to groups on the front lines of combating addiction. Organizations have until Jan. 17 to apply for the next round of grant funding to be awarded by the commission, Coleman's office said.
Last year, the commission approved more than $12 million in funding for 51 Kentucky organizations to carry out prevention, treatment and recovery programs, Coleman said.
“This is real money doing real good across this commonwealth,” he said.
Meanwhile, Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell has aided the effort by steering huge sums of federal funding to his home state of Kentucky to help combat its addiction woes.
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Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
