The city of Baltimore decided to accept court winnings of $152 million from a pair of drug distributors in its opioid lawsuit, amounting to a little more than half of what a jury awarded the city late last year.

The winnings bring the total that Baltimore has won from drug companies to $579.8 million, including more than $400 million in settlements that were reached before trial.

A jury of city residents issued a massive $266 million verdict against the drug distributors, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, after a seven-week trial last year. But the judge who heard the case, Baltimore City Circuit Judge Lawrence Fletcher-Hill, ruled in June that the amount was “grossly excessive” and ordered a new trial to determine damages.

To avoid a second trial, the city could instead accept a reduced verdict of about $52 million, Fletcher-Hill wrote in his decision. The city would also get an additional $100 million in abatement money aimed at rectifying the ongoing harms of the opioid crisis if it took the deal, the judge decided this month.

In a statement late Thursday, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said the city’s law department chose to take the deal.

“While this amount is lower than the jury awarded us, this award still dwarfs the original amount the city would have received, had we not brought this separate litigation on behalf of our city,” Scott said. “This is also the only successful jury verdict and only successful judgement against either of these companies.”

Baltimore has experienced the highest rate of overdose deaths of any major city in America, according to a series of articles in The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times last year.

McKesson and AmerisourceBergen declined to comment on the city’s decision. A McKesson spokesperson said previously that the company plans to appeal.

Bruce Poole, an attorney in Hagerstown who has helped handle opioid lawsuits for several Western Maryland communities, said it made sense that the city accepted the offer. A retrial would have drawn out a case that is seven years old and required rolling the dice with a new panel of jurors.

“I think the jury looked at the evidence and realized what a horrible epidemic this has been for the city, and that the damage continues to this day, and made awards that were appropriate,” Poole said. “But the city also had to be pragmatic and practical and realize that, if they didn’t take the judge’s offer, then the future was uncertain and the path was long.”

The city chose a bold strategy when it took the drug companies to trial. The vast majority of the communities that have sued opioid companies across the United States have settled. Baltimore settled with many of the companies it named in its lawsuit before the trial began, including Johnson & Johnson, Walgreens and Cardinal Health, in a windfall totaling more than $400 million.

But McKesson and AmerisourceBergen pursued the case to a trial, where the city argued that the drug distributors — essentially middlemen in the pharmaceutical supply chain — failed to monitor and halt suspiciously large orders of opioid painkillers being shipped to Baltimore-area pharmacies. The two companies sent about 60% of the half a billion opioids that flooded Baltimore and Baltimore County from 2006 to 2016, according to federal drug dispensing data.

The city’s lawsuit argued that the enormous supply of opioids created a new population of people experiencing opioid use disorder who then turned to more dangerous and unpredictable street drugs when federal crackdowns made prescription painkillers more difficult to access.

The city also asked Fletcher-Hill to award $5 billion in abatement money, which is intended to remediate the ongoing harms of Baltimore’s opioid crisis. The sweeping abatement plan included the city’s wish list for services, including harm reduction, addiction treatment and wraparound services such as housing and nutrition.

Fletcher-Hill offered the city $100 million in abatement money in a decision issued last week. The judge denied funding for opioid treatment, noting such programs already exist in Baltimore and are mostly covered by Medicaid. He rejected funding for services he deemed too far removed from the crisis, such as HIV treatment and mental health services.

Even with the reduced verdict, Baltimore has won more than the entire state of Maryland will receive as part of a massive “global settlement” with Johnson & Johnson, McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health. The statewide settlement will be paid out over 18 years.

Poole said the city’s outcome shows the success — and the limitations — of lawsuits as a strategy for cash-strapped communities to find funds for much-needed addiction services. The city won a huge amount of money from drug companies, but money can only do so much.

“Fundamentally, that’s the problem with the opioid epidemic,” he said. “The ability to cause harm is far greater than the ability to make good and repair.”