How We Should Spend Opioid Settlement Funds

Our country is at a critical moment when it comes to overdose deaths. The number of people dying from preventable overdose deaths is  higher than ever — we’re losing more than 220 people every single day in this country. 

At the same time, states have secured more than $55 billion in funding from successful lawsuits against Purdue and other big pharma companies. So with settlement funds available over the next 15 years and a clear crisis on our hands, will our country double down on the same failed drug war tactics or choose a better future?

The organizations and people who work on the frontlines of the overdose crisis have been starved for funding for decades. We know what solutions work, and it’s not tickets, arrests, or forced treatment.

That’s why my organizations, VOCAL-US and VOCAL-KY, joined nearly 200 organizations this month to release a new set of recommendations for how local and state lawmakers can spend settlement funds. If we want to curb the tide of overdose deaths, we must fund housing, care, and services — not cops and criminalization. 

Caring and compassionate strategies are exactly what my loved ones would have benefited from when I was growing up. I saw many family members and friends succumb to drug use, ripped from us only to end up in prison or dead. I saw Child Protective Services threaten my mother with removing us from the home. The War on Drugs has torn apart generations upon generations of families and entire communities like mine over the last fifty years. But if criminalization worked, we wouldn’t be in the unrelenting crisis we’re in right now. 

What our country needs right now is proven, health-based approaches that treat drug users with dignity and respect. We need to fund local organizations and outreach workers doing harm reduction in their communities — rural, suburban, and metropolitan.

We need to make medication-assisted treatments (like buprenorphine and methadone) universally available in our communities and for people who are incarcerated. We need to provide supportive housing, legal aid, and employment services for those trying to get on their feet. All of these strategies keep people alive without locking them up and throwing away the key. 

Just as crucial as knowing how to allocate funds is educating lawmakers about how they should not be spent. 

We’ve already seen how powerful police forces are using settlement funding for failed drug war tactics. This funding cannot go towards law enforcement overtime, or beefing up police weapons and equipment. 

This funding can’t go to drug treatment programs that are involuntary, abstinence-only, or make people jump through endless hoops either. This funding cannot contribute to the continued separation of families or ineffective curriculums like DARE. 

Local officials need to put stigma aside and make sure current or former users have a seat at the decision making table. From start to finish, there must be transparency in how strategies are proposed, chosen, and implemented. We must be innovative in our approaches and consider interventions like affordable housing, childcare, legal aid, and outreach at the same time as public health tools, like sterile supplies and fentanyl testing strips. 

There’s no magic bullet solution that will end the overdose crisis overnight, but the settlement funding does provide an extraordinary opportunity to start tackling the problem. For the first time in history, there are billions of dollars available to fund multiple, evidence-based strategies. State and local officials can’t incarcerate their way out of the overdose crisis — it hasn’t worked and never will. 

Settlement funds were secured to account for the pain and destruction the pharmaceutical industry did to this country. Let’s rise to meet this moment and fund proven solutions that center people who use drugs, not condemn them.