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A US judge has ordered three large pharmacy chains to pay $650.5 million (€640.1 million) for helping fuel a painkiller crisis in two Ohio counties, Lake and Trumbull.

The companies plan to appeal.

More than 3,000 lawsuits have been filed against opioid manufacturers and pharmacies in the hopes of recouping the costs spent combating the crisis.

Millions of US citizens became addicted to opiate-based painkillers such as Fentanyl and OxyContin in recent decades.

The fine will be used to help offset the impact of painkiller addiction.

In November, a federal court found that pharmacy firms Walgreens Boots Alliance, CVS and Walmart helped create an oversupply of addictive opioid pills, by failing to ensure that prescriptions were valid, thus flooding communities with pills.

Between 2012-16, over 80 million painkillers were available in Trumbull County, or 400 pills per resident. In Lake, the figure stood at 61 million pills over the same period.

In court, attorneys for both Lake and Trumbull counties, adjacent to Cleveland, put the total financial cost of the crisis at $3.3 billion.

The court heard that the addiction crisis put an enormous strain on local resources, social programmes and legal systems.

Almost half a million deaths are linked to painkiller overdoses between 1999 and 2019. 

Lake County Commissioner John Hamercheck said that the ruling "marks the start of a new day in our fight to end the opioid crisis".

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