Maryland to receive another $13 million to combat opioid crisis

Maryland will receive more than $13 million from seven opioid manufacturers as part of a new settlement announced Friday by state Attorney General Anthony Brown.

Maryland has already won hundreds of millions of dollars from lawsuits against opioid companies. The funds will be earmarked to combat the ongoing overdose crisis, which killed more than 1,400 people in the state last year.

The new settlements are with companies that made and sold generic opioids, such as oxycodone, hydrocodone and fentanyl patches, across the country, according to a news release from Brown’s office. The companies are Alvogen, Amneal, Apotex, Hikma, Mylan, Sun and Zydus.

The settlement agreements also impose limits on how the companies conduct business. Those limits include prohibitions on marketing opioid products to prescribers or patients and on tying sales staff pay or discipline to opioid sales volume, the release said. Additionally, each company must monitor and report suspicious orders of its opioid products.

In a statement, Brown said that communities in Maryland continue to live with addiction and loss caused by the opioid crisis.

“These settlements will fund treatment and recovery that helps Marylanders break the cycle of addiction and also require safeguards that keep the drug companies responsible for the crisis from fueling another,” Brown said.

In May, Maryland’s Office of Overdose Response launched an online dashboard that tracks how opioid settlement dollars are being spent across the state.

At that time, Maryland was expected to receive more than $747 million over the next 15 years, and nearly $170 million had been made available to counties and cities across the state.