Since 2015, companies that sell opioids, as well as their makers, have been paying out millions of dollars in settlements to the people those products have harmed. Currently, that number is around $50 billion, and the public has been aware of how much each state would receive.
However, those funds were not meant to stay entirely at the state level. In accordance with guidelines established throughout the myriad settlements, those funds were to be partly distributed to counties for use in opioid abuse prevention and recovery. What each county received was not public information until recently, when KFF Health News successfully acquired the details for nearly every state involved in these litigations.
KFF’s work has revealed how much money each county within each state has received in compensation for the damage caused by opioids. This information is critical to knowing how prepared an area is to deal with the crisis because, as the president of Harm Reduction Ohio, Dennis Cauchon, said, “opioid remediation work is done at the local level,” and that requires funding.
Knowing the amount of funding will ensure that communities have the ability to choose the best ways to fight the epidemic of opioid overdoses, says Regina LaBelle, director of the addiction and public policy initiative at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute.
Georgia’s rate of overdose has increased by nearly 62% since 2019.
Georgia will eventually receive over $636 million dollars in compensation from the some of the largest opioid manufacturers, such as Johnson & Johnson, and distributors, such as McKesson. Twenty-five percent of that money will go to local governments based on the Georgia Memorandum of Understanding in the settlement. While the state government is obligated to give an annual report on the spending of their 75% of the funds, local governments are not.
What each locality receives is based on the Negotiation Class Action Model, which states that each region’s share is determined by “(1) the number of persons suffering opioid use disorder in the county; (2) the number of opioid overdose deaths that occurred in the county; and (3) the amount of opioids distributed within the county.”
Here in Georgia, local governments received $2.7 million dollars from 2021-2022 from distributors and an additional $15.9 million from Janssen for a total of approximately $18.6 million dollars. DeKalb County received $312,063.48 from distributors and $847,299.46 from Janssen for a total of $1,159,362.94. Fulton County received $252,178.14 from distributors and $684,701.72 from Janssen for a total of $936,879.86. The counties will also receive more this month. The funds are to be primarily used for opioid addiction prevention and recovery.
This model can seem as though it is merely based on population and not on need; for example, while “Los Angeles County was allocated $6.3 million from Janssen [a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson] … Mendocino County, which has one of the highest opioid overdose death rates in the state, was allocated about $185,000.” However, Los Angeles County had nearly 1,500 more opioid-related deaths than Mendocino in 2020 despite its lower rate, which clearly illustrates the issue of scale in this fight. Though Los Angeles’s rate of overdose is lower, in a county with such a large population, that number is immensely larger than a smaller county with a higher rate of overdose.
KFF will continue tracking how the money is spent as payments continue to come in. Payments will continue through 2038. The hope is that this money will help local governments combat this crisis, but transparency on how the funds are spent is critical to that as well.
