Albertsons must pay $900 million for fueling opioid epidemic in Washington state, judge rules

By Nate Raymond

Nov 5 (Reuters) - Albertsons ACI.N must pay the state of Washington $900 million for helping fuel an opioid epidemic in the state by failing through its pharmacies to prevent the misuse of addictive painkillers, a state court judge ruled on Thursday.

King County Superior Court Judge Janet Helson in Seattle issued the decision after presiding over a non-jury trial in a lawsuit the state's attorney general filed against the grocery retailer in 2022.

The lawsuit was one of thousands that states and local governments filed in recent years seeking to hold pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors and pharmacies responsible for a deadly opioid addiction epidemic that ravaged the country.

From 1999 to 2023, about 806,000 people in the US died from an opioid overdose, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overdose deaths have been on the decline since 2023, the CDC says.

The vast majority of the lawsuits have been resolved through large nationwide settlements that now total roughly $58 billion. Albertsons in April announced a $774 million settlement to resolve most of the cases against it nationwide.

But rather than joining that deal, the state of Washington opted to continue with its lawsuit in hopes of convincing Helson to find Albertsons liable for creating a public nuisance and violating the state's consumer protection law.

The state at trial asked Helson to force Albertsons to pay $2.2 billion to address, or abate, the harms caused by the epidemic and require it to pay additional penalties as well.

The state's attorneys argued that Albertsons put profits over safety, and overworked its own pharmacists to the point that they were powerless to investigate potential “red flags” in the prescriptions they filled.

Albertsons operates 200 pharmacies in Washington, mostly under its Safeway brand. The state alleged that Albertsons pharmacies from 2006 to 2022 unlawfully filled prescriptions for opioids more than 6.5 million times that had red flags signaling they could be diverted for illicit use.

More than 26,000 Washingtonians have died from an opioid overdose during the epidemic, the state said.

Albertsons denied wrongdoing. Its lawyers said the company sold legal drugs that were prescribed by doctors and that it was not the job of pharmacists to question the judgment call of a patient's doctor unless there was a real reason to suspect a prescription was illegitimate.