Maine to Receive at Least $235 Million in Settlements From Companies Accused of Contributing to the Opioid Crisis

Maine stands to receive at least $235 million over the next nearly two decades as the result of national settlements with some of the companies accused of supercharging the opioid epidemic.

The settlements end years of litigation filed by dozens of states and other plaintiffs against the companies, alleging they led a misleading, dangerous and ultimately deadly campaign for more than two decades to put pharmaceutical opioids into the medicine cabinets of people across the country.

This campaign, the plaintiffs say, created the opioid crisis and contributed to the situation that saw 105,000 people die of drug overdoses in the United States last year, largely fueled by increasingly lethal drugs like the synthetic opioid fentanyl. More than 932,000 people have died from a drug overdose between 1999 and 2020, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly two-thirds of those deaths involved an opioid.

Read the source article at newscentermaine.com