Lawyers pause plan to divide any national opioid settlement

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

State and local governments suing over the toll of a nationwide opioid crisis agree that companies in the drug industry should be held accountable, but they have differences on who should have the power to strike any settlement, and how it should work.

Those disputes had been mostly in the background until this week, when a majority of the nation’s state attorneys general signed letters warning of problems with lawyers’ plans for creating a mechanism to divide any settlement money among nearly 25,000 local and county governments – if a deal can be struck.

But at a hearing Tuesday, any public feud was paused.

Lawyers for local governments, responding to those letters as well as objections from drug distributors and pharmacies and questions from local governments, asked if they could have two weeks to modify their plan.

Judge Dan Polster, who is overseeing lawsuits from nearly 2,000 municipal, county and tribal governments, agreed. After that, parties in the case and the state attorneys general will have time to respond to the reformulated plan.

Judge Polster scheduled a hearing on it for Aug. 6.

None of the lawyers in the courtroom objected to the delay.

The judge said he understands why city and county governments have filed their own lawsuits. “It’s the legacy of the tobacco settlement,” he said.

In the 1990s, states sued tobacco companies in cases with some parallels to the opioid cases. Local governments mostly stayed out of the litigation. In 1998, attorneys general worked out a settlement that by 2017 had paid states a total of $126 billion, according to the Public Health Law Center, with less than 1 percent of that amount going to anti-smoking programs. Other funds went to shore up state budgets and other causes.

But attorneys general say that giving local governments too much authority complicates the opioid litigation. So far, 48 states have filed some kind of legal action against at least one drug company and the other two – Michigan and Nebraska – have publicly said they’re investigating.