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Faced with disproportionately high addiction and death rates during the opioid epidemic, hundreds of Native American tribes reached a $590 million tentative settlement Tuesday with Johnson & Johnson and the nation’s three largest drug distributors.
A total of $665 million will be paid out to the tribes, with a $75 million settlement between distributors and Cherokee Nation last fall.
Additional money has also been committed to them by Purdue Pharma in a deal that is currently being mediated.
“We are not solving the opioid crisis with this deal, but we are getting critical resources to tribal communities to help resolve the crisis,” said Steven Skikos, the tribes’ top attorney.
Tuesday’s settlement, announced in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, the headquarters of the national opioid litigation, is similar to the deal with states and local governments. last summer.
As expected, if most tribes signed, the treaty would be notable for its size and for considering 574 federally recognized tribes as a separate litigation unit. In previous national settlements that included states such as Big Tobacco, their voices have traditionally been excluded or despised.
About 15 percent of the total will go to legal fees and expenses, but the majority will go towards addiction treatment and prevention programs, which will be overseen by tribal health professionals.
“My tribe has already committed to using any revenue to confront the opioid crisis,” said Aaron Payment, President of Sault Ste. The Marie tribe of Chippewa, Michigan, which has 45,000 members. “The impact of the opioid epidemic is so widespread that tribes need all the resources we can secure to bring our tribal communities together once again.”
A signature achievement of this agreement is its timeline, which is much more compressed than last summer’s with states and local governments. Johnson & Johnson will pay the tribes $150 million over two years; distributors will pay $440 million over six and a half years.
In contrast, the drugmaker will pay thousands of local governments and states $5 billion over nine years, distributors — AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson — $21 billion over 18 years.
Distributors did not respond to requests for comment. Johnson & Johnson said the deal did not represent an admission of wrongdoing. The company said it will continue to defend itself in other situations.
While about 175 tribes will sue these and other pharmaceutical companies, the remaining 574 tribes will also benefit. The population size of the tribes ranges from about 400,000 to a handful of people. According to 2018 census data, 6.8 million people self-identify as Native American or Alaska Native, or 2.1 percent of the American population, slightly less than half, live on or near tribal lands and are likely eligible for tribal services such as healthcare.
But American Indians and Alaska Natives endured a disproportionately high rate of opioid-related overdose deaths by most measures. For example, in 2016, Oglala Lakota County, home to the Oglala Lakota tribe in South Dakota, had an opioid-related death rate of 21 per 100,000, more than double the state average. According to one study, pregnant American Indian women were up to 8.7 times more likely to be diagnosed with opioid addiction or abuse than pregnant women in other groups.
Lloyd B. Miller, a leading attorney for the tribes, said the deal “provides enormous funding compared to per capita funding by state, because the opioid disaster has caused such a massive and disproportionate devastation among tribal communities.”
The deal will move forward when 95 percent of the tribes facing the case formally accept it.
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