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Teva Pharmaceuticals will pay Oklahoma $ 85 million to settle charges that it contributed to fueling the opioid crisis in the state.
Teva and the state government finalized the agreement before the trial, which was to begin Tuesday. Proceedings will continue against the accused Johnson & Johnson, the world's largest drug maker, who has not reached an agreement with the state.
Oklahoma is looking to recover money from pharmaceutical companies for the wave of addiction related to painkillers that has swept the country and places a financial burden on states. According to the National Institute of Addictions, the crisis has ravaged communities and killed about 130 people every day.
This settlement is the second in a lawsuit filed by the state after Purdue Pharma reached a $ 270 million deal in March.
The bulk of this money will be used to fund an addiction treatment and research center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Purdue is the manufacturer of OxyContin, the drug at the heart of the opioid crisis. In 2007, the company was fined $ 634.5 million for fraudulently minimizing the risk of abuse and addiction badociated with its painkillers.
The Attorney General of Oklahoma, Mike Hunter, said Sunday that the Teva agreement reflected the efforts of the state legal team to hold the defendants in this case accountable for the epidemic of opioid overdose and addiction that continues to make thousands of victims each year ".
Teva, who has sold generic opioids and a drug for cancer patients, will make a one-time payment to the state, and said the regulation "does not establish any wrongdoing on the part of the society".
The settlement comes after Kåre Schultz, chief executive of Teva, said earlier this month that the wave of lawsuits was unfair because pharmaceutical companies had followed the law.
Mr. Schultz said that it would be "very strange to do anything with the settlement while you have done absolutely nothing wrong", during a phone call with badysts following the first quarter results of the company.
Teva is one of many pharmaceutical companies involved in approximately 1,600 lawsuits related to the opioid crisis. Many of these prosecutions were consolidated in a case involving several districts and in court in October.
Oklahoma will use funds from the Teva settlement to address the state's drug crisis, Hunter's office said, before further details will be released in the future. The terms of the settlement will take up to two weeks to be finalized.
"Almost all Oklahomans have been negatively affected by this deadly crisis and we look forward to Tuesday, where we will prove our case against Johnson & Johnson and its affiliates," said Hunter.
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