On Monday, Cuyahoga County of Ohio announced that a position is created to ensure that all the settlement amount received from the opioid litigation be used to combat the epidemic.
Brandy Carney, the county's former chief of public safety and justice services officer, is appointed to handle the settlement funds by Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish. An annual salary of $130,500 from the settlement amount will go to Carney.
The task assigned to Carney involves the management of the current settlement amount, totaling around $179 million, between the county and major drug companies. She will be reporting to Chief of Staff Bill Mason. The county stated that the position is created to guarantee that the money will solely be used to address opioid addiction.
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.
U.S. District Judge Dan Polster is presiding over more than 2,600 lawsuits consolidated under MDL No. 2804 (In Re: National Prescription Opiate Litigation).
