Public art in Altoona, Penn., one of many cities hit hard by the opioid epidemic. Marianne Sinisi organized the installation after her son died of a drug overdose. State and local governments have received about $3 billion to date of a total of $50 billion in settlements from national lawsuits.
Nancy Andrews/KFF Health News
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Nancy Andrews/KFF Health News
Public art in Altoona, Penn., one of many cities hit hard by the opioid epidemic. Marianne Sinisi organized the installation after her son died of a drug overdose. State and local governments have received about $3 billion to date of a total of $50 billion in settlements from national lawsuits.
Nancy Andrews/KFF Health News
Thousands of local governments across the country are receiving payments from companies that make, distribute or sell opioid painkillers, such as Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergen, and Walmart. Companies are spending a total of more than $50 billion in settlements from national lawsuits. But figuring out the exact amount each city or county received is nearly impossible because the company managing the settlement has not made the information public.
Until now.
After more than a month in contact with the state attorney general, the private attorneys working on the settlement, and the settlement administrators, KFF Health News obtained documents showing the exact amount – to every cent – to which local authorities have been allocated for 2022 and 2023. More than 200 spreadsheets detail the amount paid by four of the companies involved in the national settlements. (A number of other opioid-related companies will begin paying later this year.)
Searching for documents to see how much your community may have received so far.
For example, Jefferson County, Kentucky – home of Louisville – received $860,657.73 from three pharmaceutical distributors this year, while Knox County, a rural Kentucky county in Appalachia – an area where many who considered the starting point of the crisis – received $ 45,395.33.
In California, Los Angeles County was allocated $6.3 million from Janssen, the pharmaceutical subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, this year. Mendocino County, where one of the highest opioid overdose mortality rate in the state, has been allocated approximately $185,000.
“Access to this information is revolutionary for those who care about how this money will be used,” said Dennis Cauchon, president of the nonprofit advocacy group. Ohio Harm Reduction.
Some states, like North Carolina And Colorado, posted online the specifics of their distribution. But in most other places, tracking payments requires people to call, email, and request public records to every local government they want information about.
As a result, collecting data across a single state can mean contacting hundreds of locations. For the country, that could translate into thousands.
Cauchon has been looking for this information for his state since April 2022. “Substance remedial work is done at the local level, at the individual level, and now, for the first time. , the locals working on this will know how much money is available in their community.”
The national opioid settlements are the second largest public health settlement of all time, after the tobacco master settlement of the 1990s. This amount means remedial measure for the way the tobacco settlements are located. The corporation heavily advertised opioid painkillers, sparking an overdose crisis that has now largely turned to illicit drugs, such as fentanyl. More than 105,000 Americans died of drug overdose last year.
To date, state and local governments have received a combined total of more than $3 billion, according to a national summary document created by Brown Greera court-appointed firm administering the settlement and processing the distribution of payments.
In each state, the settlement fund is divided by different percentages among state agencies, local governments, and in some cases boards that oversee substance reduction trusts. The payments begin in 2022 and will continue through 2038, setting up what public health experts and advocates are calling an unprecedented opportunity to make progress in combating it. Epidemics have ravaged America for three decades. KFF Health News is tracking how governments use — and abuse — this money in one year-long investigation.
The latest archive is taken from BrownGreer. The company is one of the few entities that knows exactly how much money each state and local government receives and when, as it oversees complex calculations involving various terms and deadlines in the settlement of each company.
Even so, there are gaps in the information it shares. Some states have chosen not to receive their payments through BrownGreer. Some direct the company to pay a sum to the state, which will then distribute it to the local government. In those cases, BrownGreer does not have local attribution figures. Several states dealing with opioid-related companies that are separate from national agreements are also not included in BrownGreer’s data.
Roma Petkauskas, a partner at BrownGreer, said the settlement requires the company to send notice of payment amounts to state and local governments, as well as to the companies that settled. It shared the document when asked by KFF Health News, but it is unclear if the company will continue to do so in the future.
Petkauskas wrote, “The Settlement Agreements do not stipulate that such notices be made public,” indicating that disclosure is not a requirement.
Those hurt by the opioid crisis say they want more transparency than minimum requirements. Currently, it is not only difficult to determine how much money the government receives, they say, but it is also difficult to determine how that money is spent. Many people have Reach out to local officials with questions or suggestions only to be rejected or ignored.
Christine Minhee, founder OpioidSettlementTracker.comfound that, as of March, only 12 states had commitment to public reporting the use of 100% of their payment amount. Since then, only three more states have promised to share details about the use of their funds.
Legal and political experts who monitor the settlements say the lack of transparency may be related to political leverage. The state attorney general hailed these agreements as achievements in brilliant press releases.
“Minister of Justice [Daniel] Cameron today delivered on his promise to fight the opioid epidemic by announcing a more than $53 million deal with Walmart,” one reader read. Press Release issued late last year by the state of Kentucky.
“Thousands of our neighbors have buried their loved ones during the opioid pandemic” and “I’m proud to have brought them this amazing deal,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said:in an announcement in July 2021 when one of the earliest settlements is finalized.
Minhee said greater transparency, including specific payment amounts to each local government, could help eliminate some of those press releases. “It’s hard to politicize things when you can’t present the numbers in a vacuum.”
If one community compares its payment of a few hundred dollars with another community’s payment of thousands of dollars, there can be political consequences. Concerns have arose in the countryside hit hard by the crisis whose distribution formula is too heavy on population numbers and they won’t get enough money to cover the damage for decades.
However, experts say making this data public is an important step to ensure settlements accomplish their goal of saving lives and overcoming this crisis.
Solutions must be community-led, says Regina LaBelle, director of addiction and public policy initiatives at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute. “To do that, the communities themselves need to know how much money they’re getting.”
If their county gets $5,000 this year, it makes no sense to campaign for a $500,000 rehab facility. Instead, they could focus on buying naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal drug. Knowing the annual amount also allows people to keep track of the funds and make sure they aren’t mis-spent, LaBelle adds.
For Cauchon, of Harm Reduction Ohio, payment data at the local level is key to ensuring payments are used efficiently in each Ohio county.
“Knowledge is power, and in this case, it’s the ability to know how much money to spend to prevent an overdose,” he said.
Health News KFFformerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth health-related journalism and is one of the core executive programs at KFF — independent source for health policy research, voting and journalism.
