According to one study, opioid dependency was high in pregnant American Indian women, as much as 8.7 times more likely than pregnant women from other demographic groups. Hundreds of Native American tribes that have suffered disproportionately high addiction and death rates during the opioid epidemic with Johnson & Johnson and the country’s three largest drug distributors agreed to a tentative settlement of USD 590 million.
“We are not solving the opioid crisis with this settlement, but we are getting critical resources to tribal communities to help address the crisis,” said Steven Skikos, a top lawyer for the tribes.
“My tribe has already committed to use any proceeds to confront the opioid crisis,” said Chairman Aaron Payment of the Sault Ste, Marie tribe of Chippewa in Michigan. “The impact of the opioid epidemic is pervasive, such that tribes need all the resources we can secure to make our tribal communities whole once again.”
Lloyd B. Miller, a lead lawyer for the tribes, said that the settlement “provides outsized funding as compared to the states on a per-capita basis because the opioid disaster caused outsized and disproportionate devastation across tribal communities.”
Geoffrey Strommer, a lawyer for the tribes, said the tribes were determined that the bitter outcome of the Big Tobacco litigation more than two decades earlier not be repeated in the opioid litigation. Mr. Strommer said that the states never set aside money from the Big Tobacco funds for the tribes themselves.
