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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Northwest tribes could benefit from $590 million opioid settlement to combat ‘domino effect of addiction’

Native American tribes have reached settlements worth $590 million over opioids. A court filing made Tuesday in Cleveland lays out the details of the settlements with drugmaker Johnson & Johnson and distribution companies AmerisoruceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson.  (Keith Srakocic)

WASHINGTON – Nearly four years after the Nez Perce Tribe joined a lawsuit against makers and distributors of opioid pain medications, a $590 million settlement reached Tuesday could send much-needed funds to Northwest tribes to combat the ongoing addiction crisis.

Under the tentative settlement filed in a court in Cleveland, drugmaker Johnson & Johnson would pay tribes $150 million over two years while three drug distributors – AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson – would pay the remaining $440 million over seven years, the Associated Press reported.

The development comes after the same companies reached a $26 billion settlement with states in July 2021 over their role in the decades-long public health crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, with a disproportionate impact on Indigenous people.

Purdue Pharma, another drugmaker at the center of the crisis, will pay tribes millions more through a separate settlement.

Samuel Penney, chairman of the Nez Perce tribal executive committee, welcomed the news, though he emphasized the tribe’s elected leaders had not yet decided whether to opt into the settlement. The opioid crisis has had a dramatic impact on the Nez Perce Reservation over the years, he said, as tribal members became addicted to painkillers that were touted as virtually nonaddictive.

“Like many tribes across the country, our tribe has paid a huge price with the health of our tribal members from the use of opioids,” Penney said. “So we just hope that, whatever amount of funds we receive, we make the best use of it.”

Nationwide, Native Americans were nearly 50% more likely to die from an opioid overdose than the rest of the population during the height of the opioid epidemic between 2006 and 2014, a Washington Post analysis found in 2020.

Karen Hendren, director of behavioral health for Nimiipuu Health, which runs two clinics on the Nez Perce Reservation, said doctors there prescribed opioids such as oxycodone at a higher rate than in the surrounding area. When tribal public health officials noticed that pattern, doctors became more cautious about prescribing the drugs, only to see patients who had become addicted start to buy the pills and other opioids on the street.

“We had a high rate of prescriptions that we were writing for our patients because of pain, believing that this was the right course to help folks with their pain,” Hendren said. “That created just this whole domino effect of addiction, so people are now buying heroin, fentanyl, any kind of opioid they can get their hands on.”

Nimiipuu Health now provides outpatient addiction treatment services including naltrexone, a drug that helps reduce cravings, but she said their clinics have been “inundated” with people addicted to opioids. While the tribe has received grants for opioid addiction treatment, Hendren said additional funding could help provide sober housing or fund treatment at inpatient facilities elsewhere, like the San Poil treatment center that opened last year on the Colville Reservation.

Donald Simon, a partner at Sonosky Chambers, one of the firms involved in the litigation, said all 574 federally recognized tribes will be able to opt into the settlement and receive funds based on a formula that takes into account factors including the number of enrolled tribal members and the rate of opioid addiction among them.

“The funds have to be used for abatement of the opioid epidemic in their reservation community, but there’s a long list of abatement programs that is incorporated into the settlement that is very broadly defined,” Simon said. “One tribe may make very different decisions than another tribe about how best to spend the funds in their community.”

A tribe will not have to show damages to qualify for the funds, and the amount each receives is not dependent on whether it has an Indian Health Service facility on its reservation, said Simon, a member of the Tribal Leadership Committee set up by the court in Cleveland to collectively manage the multidistrict litigation.

Penney said the disproportionate impact of the opioid epidemic on Native Americans is part of a broader problem of health disparities for Indigenous people, pointing to the fact that the federal government has for years spent less per patient through the Indian Health Service than it spends on health care for inmates in federal prisons.