Columbus in line for as much as $200K in nationwide opioid addiction settlement

COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – Wednesday, city attorney Jeff Turnage announced that Columbus could be receiving more than $215,000 from a class-action lawsuit over the opioid addiction crisis in the United States.

It’s part of a $26 billion nationwide settlement against the manufacturers, distributors and retailers of opioids.

“The people dying from opioid overdoses throughout the country, it’s like a 747, fully loaded, crashing every three or four months,” Turnage says.

Mississippi in particular.

“You have a lot of areas here in Mississippi that are two or three times the state average for opioid addiction,” says Sims & Sims attorney Corky Smith.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. opioid dispensing rate in 2020 was 43.3 prescriptions per 100 people. In Lowndes County, it’s up to 56.2 prescriptions per 100 people.

In 2017, Smith joined the multi-district lawsuit against the entities within the pharmaceutical supply chain, representing 15 different entities from Mississippi, including Columbus, Lowndes County and Starkville.

“In my lifetime, I’ve seen a lot of close friends, a lot of people that I’ve known, who’ve become addicted to opioids,” he says.

The proposed settlement with three distributors and manufacturer Johnson and Johnson is expected to bring in $200 million to Mississippi, which will be allocated across more than 100 different cities and counties.

“And this is only from one defendant,” Turnage says. “It’s anticipated there’ll be more money coming from other defendants.”

Smith says that 70 percent of the money will go towards stopping addiction in coordination with the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

“From a counseling level, from a medical personnel level, working with drug courts, law enforcement, to really take this burden off of the local communities,” he explained.

Another 15 percent of the money will go to paying the litigation costs. But the final15 percent will be given to the city government to spend however it wants.

“Allowing those to go into the general fund I think will better serve the local interest than having certain strings attached for certain things,” Smith says. “Because a significant portion is already going to abatement to solve this problem. (This money is) to aid in basically recovering from the past problems.”

The attorney expects the money to start coming in during the summer of 2022.