Public art in Altoona, Pennsylvania, one of many cities hit hard by the opioid epidemic. Marianne Sinisi organized the device after her son died of an overdose. So far, state and local governments have won about $3 billion of the total $50 billion in settlements from lawsuits nationwide.
Nancy Andrews/KFF Health News
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Nancy Andrews/KFF Health News
Public art in Altoona, Pennsylvania, one of many cities hit hard by the opioid epidemic. Marianne Sinisi organized the device after her son died of an overdose. So far, state and local governments have won about $3 billion of the total $50 billion in settlements from lawsuits nationwide.
Nancy Andrews/KFF Health News
Thousands of local governments across the country are receiving settlement payments from companies that manufacture, distribute or sell opioid painkillers, such as Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergen and Walmart. These companies have paid out a total of more than $50 billion in settlements in state lawsuits. But it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact amount each city or county received because the company administering the settlement doesn’t make the information public.
so far.
After more than a month of conversations with state attorneys general, private attorneys working on settlements, and settlement administrators, KFF Health News has obtained the exact dollar amounts (accurate to the cent) that local governments will distribute in 2022 and 2023 ) documents. More than 200 spreadsheets detailing the amounts paid by the four companies involved in the national settlement. (Several other opioid-related companies will start paying later this year.)
search files See how much your community might have gotten so far.
For example, Jefferson County, Kentucky, where Louisville is located, has received $860,657.73 from three drug distributors this year, while Knox County, a rural Kentucky county in Appalachia that many consider zero to the crisis ) received US$ 45,395.33.
In California, Los Angeles County received a $6.3 million grant this year from Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical subsidiary Janssen. Mendocino County, which has one of the highest opioid overdose death rates in the state, received about $185,000 in funding.
Access to “this information is transformative for anyone who cares about how this money is going to be spent,” said Dennis Cauchon, president of the nonprofit Harm Reduction Ohio.
Some states, such as North Carolina and Colorado, have posted their distribution details online. But in most other places, tracking payment amounts requires people to call, email and submit a public records request to every local government they want information on.
So collecting data in one state can mean contacting hundreds of places. For the country, that could translate to thousands of people.
Cauchon has been seeking the information for his state since April 2022. available in their community. “
The national opioid settlement is the second largest public health settlement ever, after the Master Tobacco settlement in the 1990s. The money is meant to remedy the way the company has aggressively promoted opioid painkillers, fueling an overdose crisis that has now largely shifted to illicit drugs like fentanyl. More than 105,000 Americans died of drug overdose last year.
State and local governments have collectively received more than $3 billion in funding to date, according to state summary documents created by BrownGreer, a court-appointed firm that administers the settlement and handles distribution of payments.
In each state, settlement funds are split among state agencies, local governments and, in some cases, the boards that oversee the Opioid Abatement Trust. The payments, which began in 2022 and will continue through 2038, create what public health experts and advocates have called an unprecedented opportunity to make progress in the fight against the pandemic that has engulfed the United States for three decades. KFF Health News tracked how the cash was used and misused by the government in a year-long investigation.
The most recent bulk file was obtained from BrownGreer. The company is one of the few entities that knows exactly how much each state and local government receives and when, as it oversees complex calculations involving the different terms and timelines of each company’s settlement.
Even so, there are holes in the information it shares. A handful of states have chosen not to receive payments through BrownGreer. Some directed the company to make a one-time payment to the state, which then distributes it to local governments. In those cases, BrownGreer had no locally assigned data. Some state-to-state deals that have reached settlements with opioid-related companies are separate and also not part of BrownGreer’s data.
Roma Petkauskas, a partner at BrownGreer, said the settlement requires the firm to send notices of the payment amounts to state and local governments, as well as to the companies that reached the settlement. It shared the document when asked by KFF Health News, but it’s unclear whether the company will continue to do so in the future.
“The settlement agreement does not provide for the disclosure of such notices,” Petkauskas wrote, suggesting that such disclosure is not required.
People hurt by the opioid crisis say they want more transparency than the minimum required. They say it is currently difficult to determine not only how much money the government received, but also how it was spent. Many have raised issues or suggestions with local officials, but they have been rejected or ignored.
Christine Minhee, founder of OpioidSettlementTracker.com, found that as of March, only 12 states had committed to publicly reporting the use of 100% of settlement funds. Since then, only three other states have pledged to share details about their use of the money.
Legal and political experts following the settlement say the lack of transparency may be linked to political influence. The state attorneys general touted the deals as accomplishments in a vehement press release.
“Attorney General [Daniel] Cameron delivered on his pledge today to fight the opioid epidemic by announcing a more than $53 million agreement with Walmart,” read a Kentucky news release late last year.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said in a July 2021 announcement that “during the opioid epidemic, thousands of our neighbors have buried their loved ones” and that “I am proud able to offer them this great deal”.
More transparency, including how much each local government pays, could take some of the press releases out of the equation, Minhee said. “It’s hard to politicize things when you can’t present numbers in a vacuum.”
If one community compares its spending of hundreds of dollars to another’s thousands of dollars, there can be political repercussions. In rural areas hard hit by the crisis, fears have emerged that allocation formulas place too much weight on population numbers and that they will not get enough money to address decades of damage.
Still, experts say making the data public is a critical step in ensuring the settlements meet their goals of saving lives and addressing the crisis.
Solutions must be community-led, said Regina Labelle, director of the Addiction and Public Policy Initiative at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute. “In order to do that, the communities themselves need to know how much they’re getting.”
There’s no point advocating for a $500,000 drug rehab facility if their county is receiving $5,000 this year. Instead, they may focus on buying naloxone, a drug that can reverse opioid overdoses. Knowing the annual amount also allows people to track funds and make sure they haven’t been misused, LaBelle added.
For Cauchon, Ohio Harm Reduction, local-level payment data is key to ensuring settlement funds are fully utilized in every county in Ohio.
“Knowledge is power, and in this case knowledge is power in knowing how much money is available to prevent overdose,” he said.
KFF Health Newsformerly Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth news coverage of health issues as one of the center’s core operating programs Kennedy Foundation — Independent source for health policy research, opinion polls and news.
