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Drug distributor McKesson Corp has agreed to pay $37 million to resolve a lawsuit by the state of West Virginia seeking to hold it responsible for contributing to the opioid epidemic, the state's attorney general said on Thursday. The settlement announced by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey resolves one of hundreds of cases McKesson faces by states and local governments alleging it failed to identify suspicious orders by pharmacies of painkillers. (Raymond, 5/2)

McKesson, the sixth-largest American company in terms of revenue, reported over $208 billion in the last fiscal year. The giant distributor funneled enough hydrocodone and oxycodone to supply every legitimate patient with nearly 3,000 doses, state officials said. Tiny Boone County, with a population of fewer than 25,000, received 1.2 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone between 2007 and 2012, the lawsuit claimed. (Rabin, 5/2)

McKesson distributed nearly 100 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone in West Virginia — home to 1.8 million people — between 2007 and 2012, the state charged. That included, for example, 1.3 million doses in Boone County, where 24,629 people lived in 201o. In 2017, West Virginia led the nation with 57.8 drug overdose deaths per 100,000 residents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 400,000 people in the United States have died of overdoses to prescription drugs, heroin and illegal fentanyl between 1999 and 2017. (Bernstein, 5/2)

West Virginia has felt the pains of the opioid epidemic more acutely than other states. It has the highest age-adjusted rate of opioid overdose deaths in the nation, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In 2017, 81.3 opioid prescriptions were written for every 100 people in West Virginia, the institute said, which was the lowest rate there since it began tracking the data in 2006. (Randazzo, 5/2)

House lawmakers are trying to eliminate a waiver requirement that clinicians must clear before they can prescribe buprenorphine to patients for opioid addiction. Under current law and regulations, clinicians need to apply for a waiver from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to prescribe the medication-assisted treatment for addiction even though they can readily prescribe it for pain. Several state health departments have asked for federal intervention as they continue to see residents die as a result of the opioid epidemic. (Luthi, 5/2)

Cocaine deaths have been rising in the U.S., health officials said Thursday in their latest report on the nation's deadliest drug overdose epidemic. After several years of decline, overdose deaths involving cocaine began rising around 2012. And they jumped by more than a third between 2016 and 2017. (Stobbe, 5/2)

The New York attorney general’s office said it has taken down what it called a 28-person narcotics ring, part of what authorities described as an emerging threat of traffickers who distribute only oxycodone. The alleged trafficking ring sold more than $2 million of pills in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester County and Connecticut during a 10-month investigation, prosecutors said. (Ramey, 5/2)

For the last year and a half, injection drug users from across Florida have come to a tan, dented collection of shipping-containers-turned-offices nestled on the corner of a barren dirt lot in Miami’s health district. ...What has drawn them is Florida’s only legal needle exchange, where they can turn in used syringes for clean ones to avoid sharing blood-borne diseases. But they can do more than that: The IDEA Exchange, as it’s known, tests for HIV, drains abscesses, dresses their wounds. (Koh and Flechas, 5/2)