Kroger has agreed to pay $110 million to resolve a lawsuit by the state of Kentucky alleging the supermarket chain's pharmacies helped fuel a deadly opioid epidemic by flooding its communities with hundreds of millions of doses of addictive painkillers.

Kentucky will receive $110 million to settle its lawsuit accusing one of the nation’s largest grocery chains of helping fuel the opioid epidemic, the state's attorney general said Thursday. The state will use the money it is getting in its settlement with The Kroger Co.

The suit alleged Kroger bought more than four billion morphine milligram equivalents of opioids for Kentucky between 2006 and 2019, roughly equivalent to 444 million opioid doses. The company distributed almost 194 million hydrocodone pills to its Kentucky pharmacies between 2006 and 2019,