McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc., and AmerisourceBergen Corp. have renewed a settlement by offering 1 billion in legal fees to the states, cities, and counties who have sued them over the misguiding distribution of highly addictive painkillers that contain opioids.
The settlement will be useful for the treatment of people affected by the opioid crisis and can be used for social service as well. The news resulted in a rise of the share prices of the three companies by 1.5%.
Last week McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc., and AmerisourceBergen Corp. offered to pay $18 billion to twenty-one U.S. states who alleged the distributors over mishandling of opioids, but they rejected the offer by stating that the settlement is less as compared to the damage caused due to the opioid crisis throughout the nation.
Opioids are on the market for ages and have been used basically for pain relief for post-surgical pain, cancer-related pain, chronic or persistent pain. Opioids when used in proper dosage and along with a combination of other pain treatments, work in relieving pain successfully, unless there is a misuse or abuse of the drug.
Companies manufacturing opioids convinced the medical community that these medications were not addictive and were purely beneficial. This belief raised the number of prescriptions and sales unwarrantedly, resulting in a mass misuse of these drugs, to the extent that this was identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a public issue and named it an opioid crisis.
More than 400,000 people have died in the U.S. due to opioid overdose in the last two decades.
