Recent opinions have taken to criticizing New Mexico’s approach to holding manufacturers and distributors of deadly opioids accountable for decades of damage to our State. What is inconvenient for their narrative in this particular case are the actual facts. So here they are, plainly stated:
1) As part of the overall opioid litigation, New Mexico actually got two settlements from Walgreens: $47 million as part of Walgreens’ $5 billion national settlement, and $453 million as a New Mexico-only settlement, after completing a seven-week-long trial against Walgreens before a judge in Santa Fe.
2) In total, New Mexico will receive half a billion dollars from Walgreens. $500 million.
3) Had New Mexico not taken Walgreens to trial, a trial that I litigated personally, New Mexico would have only received the $47 million national settlement money. That settlement relied on population in distributing funds, meaning high-population, low-impact states got the lion’s share of the money. Small-population, highly-impacted states like New Mexico were offered only the crumbs.
4) The 12% attorney fee figure paid to outside attorneys in the national settlement that is being held up as a supposed reference for criticism does not account for a state that decided it had to take Walgreens to trial in order to get a fair recovery for its people.
5) Because New Mexico took Walgreens to trial, and even after New Mexico paid its lawyers, New Mexico still received almost eight times the treatment money the State would have otherwise received had it merely accepted the national deal. That is eight times more treatment dollars, eight times more narcan, eight times more beds in treatment centers, eight times the funding for county and local governments.
6) Taking a multi-billion dollar company to trial for seven weeks required a team of more than 50 lawyers, litigating New Mexico’s case for more than seven years before it got to trial. All of that cost was borne not by the taxpayers of New Mexico, but by these outside firms.
7) The New Mexico Legislature funds less than 100 lawyers in the Attorney General’s office, total, and the litigation costs in this single case would represent nearly three years of the office’s entire operating budget.
8) New Mexico recovered more dollars per capita in the opioid litigation than any state in the country besides West Virginia, which was also represented by outside attorneys.
9) The State’s opioid litigation brought hundreds of millions of treatment dollars into the State, without saddling the taxpayers with the cost of litigation.
10) As an aside from this major victory for the State, a recent State Ethics Commission opinion, the opinion that started this commentary, concluded that the State’s Procurement Code should be applied for selecting outside counsel in these cases. The lawyers in this case were selected pursuant to a competitive bidding process under the New Mexico Procurement Code.
These are the facts.
Regardless of how recent opinions want to spin it, what matters is that treatment professionals now have millions of dollars in funding. Law enforcement has millions of dollars in funding. We have treatment drugs available for those that want them. We can actually begin to improve the State’s health.
So we won’t apologize to those who either don’t understand, or don’t want to admit the truth about how New Mexico prevailed in the opioid litigation, but we will say to every New Mexican who lost someone they loved to the opioid crisis that New Mexico showed up in court, and now the State can actually begin to distribute these treatment funds to heal our communities.