Jun. 9—Walgreens pharmacy chain has agreed to pay the state of New Mexico $500 million to settle a 2017 lawsuit in which the state Attorney General's Office sought damages from the company and other distributors for their role in helping create the state's opioid use disorder epidemic.

The agreement was signed in March, the Attorney General's Office confirmed Friday, while the parties were waiting for a ruling following a trial in which the state asked District Judge Francis J. Mathew to order the pharmacy chain to fund a $24 billion abatement plan.

A confidentiality provision on the deal was lifted Friday, Lauren Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General's Office, wrote in an email.

"The payments will be spread out over a 15-year-period," Rodriguez wrote, with 55% going to cities and counties and the other 45% to the state. All parties must use the funds for opioid remediation, she wrote.

The settlement is in addition to the $274 million in settlements previously obtained in the case last fall from Albertsons, CVS, Kroger and Walmart, "bringing New Mexico's total recovery from the retail pharmacy defendants alone to a staggering $774 million," said a statement issued Friday by the national law firm Baron & Budd, who — along with the the New Mexico firm Robles Rael & Anaya — represented the state in the case.

The settlement is one of the largest separate settlements obtained from a single opioid defendant in the country and the largest settlement obtained from a single defendant by the attorney general in New Mexico history, according to the law firm's statement.

"I'm optimistic this will help in the fight against the opioid crisis and provide the treatment New Mexicans so desperately need," Luis Robles, one of the attorneys who worked on the case, said Friday.

Robles said the case "profoundly changed" how he looks at addiction and the connection between prescription pills and heroin use.

Attorneys representing the state argued at trial Walgreens failed to recognize and refuse to fill suspicious prescriptions.

"As a result, Walgreens dispensed millions of potentially harmful opioids into communities across New Mexico," according to Baron & Budd's statement.

The pharmacies were supposed to act as a dam, former Attorney General Hector Balderas said in his opening statement at trial last fall, keeping the drugs from flooding the market in "massive surges."

Instead, Balderas said, the defendants "smashed those dams wide open" — dispensing with safety protocols in a desire to reap historic profits from the sale of opioids without regard for the consequences.

About 80% of people who started using heroin in the past decade used prescription opioids first, one state expert testified.

"During the trial, witness after witness testified about the devastation wrought by the opioid crisis in New Mexico and the profound harm caused by opioids in communities across the state. ... Now, after more than five years of litigation ... we are confident that this record settlement positions New Mexico to turn the tide on this deadly epidemic," co-lead counsel in the trial, Mark Pifk of Baron & Budd, wrote in an email.

Robles said it's not uncommon for such cases to be settled for a fraction of what was sought at trial. Plaintiffs balance a variety of risks, he added, including the possibility a judge could reduce the amount in the face of defendants' counternarratives — for example, opposing counsel's argument in this case that so-called diseases of despair existed before the opioid crisis — and the possibility that too large an award could push a defendant into bankruptcy, making it impossible to collect the damages.

"There is the sort of reality that lawyers shoot for the stars and settle for the moon," he said.

Robles said some of the measures the state sought to accomplish with the larger $24 billion abatement plan will have to be scaled back but said the settlement represents a substantial increase in available funding for opioid use disorder compared to what the state previously allocated. The settlement also includes non-monetary conditions that will require Walgreens to adjust the way its pharmacies operate and restricts the way the funds are spent.

"This money can't be used to buy a fire truck or fix a pothole," he said.