As opioid settlement money begins to trickle in, Spokane and the county consider best use

Spokane and Spokane County will received tens of millions of dollars over the next two decades as its part of settlements between the state of Washington and opioid distributors and the pharmacies that sold the addictive pills.

The city will get around $13.3 million, while the county will receive roughly $24 million over the next 17 years. Spokane Valley will get nearly $300,000, Liberty Lake $168,000 and Cheney $535,000.

The funds can be used in myriad ways to remediate the damages caused by the opioid crisis. It’s not clear how the money will be spent, however.

Local jurisdictions can agree to pool their funds through a regional Opioid Abatement Council, or use the money for approved purposes.

County and city leaders have held several meetings about pooling funds, though no final decisions have been made, county spokesman Jared Webley said.

In a Monday committee meeting, Spokane City Council members indicated they would be interested in partnering with other agencies on particular projects but not creating a regional council, interim city attorney Lynden Smithson said.

Council members did express particular interest Monday in opening a detox center.

The disbursements come through settlements in two cases led by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

In October, municipalities across the state agreed to collectively receive $215 million of a $518 million settlement with the nation’s three largest opioid manufacturers. The state will receive $261 million of that deal. Legal fees make up the rest of the settlement. Funds will be paid out over the next 17 years, with the first and largest payment, $55 million, made last December.

Washington was one of three states to reject a nearly $20 billion settlement between the three opioid distributors – McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health – that other eligible states and local governments agreed to earlier in 2022. Instead, Ferguson continued pursuing litigation that began in 2019, which resulted in the $518 million payment, $46 million more than the state would have received under the rejected proposed settlement.

The city and county joined around 125 other local jurisdictions in agreeing to the state’s settlement with opioid distributors. That “One Washington” agreement calculated how much money to send to jurisdictions based on the number of opioids shipped to a particular area, as well as the number of opioid deaths and addiction cases in that area.

The city and county received their first allotment of that settlement in December, though the money remains unspent while local leaders decide what programs to fund.

Late last year, Ferguson also signed onto a multistate resolution with five pharmacies that sold opioid prescriptions, including CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Teva and Allergan. Washington state will receive an estimated $434.4 million from those companies, with roughly half going to local jurisdictions like Spokane.

The first payments from the pharmacy resolution are expected to come to Spokane this summer, Smithson said.

In Spokane County, as with much of the United States, the opioid crisis is largely characterized by fentanyl, a synthetic drug many times more powerful than heroin.

But public health experts and counsel for the state argued in court that this is merely the third wave of a crisis that began in the 1990s and was stoked by unscrupulous distributors, manufacturers and pharmacies.

Prescriptions and sales of opioids in Washington skyrocketed more than 500% between 1997 and 2011, according to a 2021 statement from the state Attorney’s General’s Office.

Nearly 226 million prescription pain pills were distributed in Spokane County between 2006 and 2014, enough for 54 pills per person per year, a 2019 Washington Post investigation into opioid distribution found. Of those, nearly 57 million were distributed by McKesson.

The state’s lawsuit against distributors alleged that McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen made billions fueling the opioid epidemic, shipping huge amounts of drugs into the state when they knew or should have known the drugs would fuel addictions and an illegal drug market.

The three companies have been penalized repeatedly by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for failing to stop and report suspicious opioid shipments as required by law.

The distributors reportedly allowed between 250,000 to nearly a million suspicious orders of opioids into Washington state between 2006 and 2014.

The companies disputed that they willfully contributed to the crisis, and argued in court that Washington state played a role with laws in the 1990s that made it easier to prescribe opioids, according to reporting from the Associated Press.

Pharmacies also participated in the opioid crisis, Ferguson alleged.

They should have served as the last line of defense in the supply chain but failed to prevent the overuse of opioid prescriptions, the attorney general’s office wrote in a news release.

“These companies illegally, recklessly and negligently filled opioid orders without adequately investigating ‘red flags’ of fraud or overprescribing,” the release stated.

Within city limits, more than 11 million pills were sold just at Evergreen Pharmaceutical, according to the Washington Post report.

Three Walgreens locations in Spokane and Spokane Valley reportedly sold around 20 million pills collectively during the same period.

Washington state is still involved in litigation with Johnson & Johnson, one of the largest suppliers of raw materials used to produce opioids, as well as the pharmacies of Albertsons, Kroger and Rite Aid.