Opioid payout will worsen drug crisis

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced on Friday a $17.3 billion settlement with two pharmacy chains, Walgreens and CVS, and two pharmaceutical companies, Allergan and Teva, regarding their role in the state’s opioid crisis. The huge payout, however, was mainly about prosecutors seeking the deepest pockets. The agreement might worsen the situation.

“Nothing can bring back the lives lost or erase the suffering caused by this crisis, but we are making sure those who caused it and profited from it are held to account for their greed and willful misconduct,” Bonta said in a statement. He’s right about the suffering, but wrong about the root of the problem. The crisis is real. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, overdose deaths have quintupled since 1999. Drug-overdose deaths spiked by 30% during the first year of the pandemic. The reasons are complex, but pharmacies are a particularly bad place to focus our ire.

Although not part of the settlement, Walmart’s pharmacies have faced similar lawsuits. In a statement last year, the company succinctly explained pharmacists’ Catch-22: They face liability for secondguessing prescriptions written by doctors or disciplinary action for refusing to fill legitimate prescriptions. In these cases, “plaintiff lawyers second-guess pharmacists for not second-guessing doctors.”

Punishing pharmacies for dispensing prescriptions and drug-makers for producing pain-killing drugs incentivizes people with debilitating ailments to seek relief on the black market. That is a key reason for the drug overdose epidemic. People denied legitimate prescriptions often seek illicit alternatives, where quality control and dosing oversight is slim. Fentanyl is so potent only a small amount can be fatal.

“Prescription surveillance boards and government-mandated prescribing limits have pushed prescribing down dramatically,” notes the Cato Institute. Settlements such as this one will further depress the number of legal prescriptions and continue this deadly cycle. Cato points to Portugal, which liberalized drug policy and “saw its population of heroin addicts drop 75%.”

If California wants to deal with this heartbreaking overdose crisis, it needs to spend more time rethinking its prohibitionist policies.