A $63 million opioid-lawsuit settlement will help Delaware County’s addiction services, Shapiro says

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro on Tuesday announced a “landmark” settlement of $63 million to benefit Delaware County, the county’s share of an even larger fund won from a yearslong legal battle with three pharmaceutical companies.

The money will be entirely devoted to addressing opioid addiction in Delaware County, the first county in Pennsylvania to file a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the painkillers, according to Shapiro and local leaders who spoke on the steps of the county courthouse in Media.

“The truth is, if you really want to follow the supply chain and trace this crisis to its source, you have to go after the greedy executives,” Shapiro said. “Today is the day that they pay up. And the communities they targeted? Today is the day they get to fight back with resources.”

Shapiro’s office negotiated a $1 billion settlement for Pennsylvania in July 2021 with the three companies — Cardinal Health, McKesson, and the Conshohocken-based Amerisource Bergen. Delco’s piece of that payout will be distributed over 18 years, with the first payment of $3.5 million received late last month.

The remainder of the money will be split across the state’s 66 other counties. Last year, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. sued Shapiro, saying the settlement that Shapiro proposed was too low. Their suits attempted to bar the attorney general from using the proposed settlement to relinquish the counties’ individual claims against the companies.

A Commonwealth Court judge dismissed the lawsuits in February.

» READ MORE: Larry Krasner’s lawsuit against Josh Shapiro over the national opioid settlement was dismissed by a state court

For Delaware County’s portion of the settlement, County Council Chair Monica Taylor announced that a task force has been formed to analyze the best way to invest the money, with input from the county’s Health Department and other stakeholders. The group will make a recommendation to the council in October.

“There is no amount of money that could account for the lives that opioid use has taken and ruined,” Taylor said. “But we can take this money to tackle the scourge of opioid use in our communities.”

The funds will likely go toward expanding resources the county has already started to address opioid addiction, including diversionary drug court programs and the Law Enforcement Treatment Initiative, in which local police officers are trained to act as intermediaries with treatment programs.

The settlement will also go toward accommodating county residents stuck in the limbo of backlogs and waiting lists of other programs, according to District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer.

» READ MORE: Delco joins Pa. attorney general’s program that uses local cops to connect people with addiction treatment

Stollsteimer said that while his office has been busy with street-level dealer investigations, Shapiro’s litigation rightfully targeted the “legal drug dealers” who caused opioid use to spike in Pennsylvania and across the country.

Last year, 5,224 Pennsylvanians died of opioid overdoses, including 197 in Delaware County, according to statistics from Shapiro’s office. In the first three months of 2022, investigators working with the attorney general seized 40 times the amount of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid painkiller, than they did in all of 2021.

“We can’t arrest our way out of this,” Shapiro said Tuesday. “This effort recognizes that drug abuse is a disease, not a crime.”