Louisiana is set to receive more than $325 million as part of a settlement with some of the nation’s largest opioid manufacturers and distributors to help mitigate the damage caused by the opioid crisis in the state.
Over the next 18 years, the state will receive $18 million each year. The settlement money is intended to help fund opiate addiction, treatment and advocacy and bring relief to families still struggling, but some advocates are concerned over how it’s set to be allocated.
Other states involved in the lawsuit are North Carolina, Tennessee, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
Each state’s share of the funding has been determined by a formula that takes into account the population of the state and the impact of the crisis on it — the number of overdose deaths, the number of residents with substance use disorder, and the number of opioids prescribed.
But each state has different plans for how it will allocate its share of the opioid settlement money it receives.
For instance, while not part of the $325 million settlement, Alabama will allocate half of the funds it receives from other opioid settlements to the state and half to its political subdivisions and special districts by formula.
Mississippi plans to give 70% to the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Center for Addiction Medicine, 15% to counties and municipalities, and 15% to the state.
Neither state has promised to publicly report its expenditures, meaning there’s no way for the public to track or see where the money is going. By contrast, 15 other states — like Minnesota, Oregon, and Florida — have explicitly promised to report 100% of their expenditures publicly.
Louisiana is unique in that it plans to allocate 80%of the opioid settlement funds to local governments, which will be publicly reported. The remaining 20% is slated for local sheriffs — with no requirement to report how and where the money is spent.
Advocates like Christine Minhee, an attorney and founder of the Opioid Settlement Tracker — which monitors how funds from opioid litigation are spent — are concerned that some of these funds could be used to bolster criminalization-based approaches to addiction rather than treatment or preventative.
“The fact that Louisiana's public reporting will derive solely from the localities 80% share, which must be spent on future opioid remediation — I think that that's great,” Minhee said. “But it raises obvious questions about the 20%. It'd be a wonderful opportunity for the sheriffs to get together and come up with some type of joint commitment.”
Minhee said Louisiana’s allocation plan has a great opportunity to be more open and transparent than other states’ plans. She pointed to Acadia Parish Sheriff K.P. Gibson, who also represents the Louisiana Sheriffs Association on the Opioid Abatement Administration Corporation — which is responsible for advising the state Attorney General and localities on overdose crisis abatement priorities and reviewing how funds have been spent.
Gibson said his focus in Acadia Parish was on treatment, not punishment, and that he believed solving “opioid addiction” would help ease the strain on local jails. While his words aren’t tied to any specific future opioid remediation requirements, they could help shift the focus away from punitive approaches to drug treatment.
If more Louisiana sheriffs would make similar commitments, Minhee said, it could go a long way.
“I think that that would be really persuasive,” Minhee said. “We are in an era where transparency matters a lot. The fact that hundreds of thousands of people had to die for states and localities to receive their millions makes it such that the least that states can do is to speak their expenditures loudly and clearly into the mic for the people in the back of the room to hear.”
The funds come as part of a $26 billion settlement with four major pharmaceutical giants that manufactured, marketed, and distributed opioids: Cardinal Health, McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Johnson & Johnson. Investigations by state attorneys general looked at whether the companies fulfilled their legal duty to refuse to ship opioids to pharmacies that submitted suspicious drug orders and whether they misled patients and doctors about the addictive nature of opioid drugs.
The drugs fueled an epidemic of addiction. In 2021, more than 1,300 people in Louisiana died of drug overdoses, and the numbers have been on the rise over the last few years. Some parishes saw an increase in drug-involved overdose deaths of more than 200% from 2016 to 2021.
The settlement also includes new policies and practices that the companies must abide by to prevent the crisis from occurring again, including establishing oversight to eliminate “blind spots” in the systems used by distributors, prohibiting shipping of and reporting of suspicious opioid orders, and stopping sales staff from influencing decisions related to identifying suspicious opioid orders, among others.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR. Support for health equity coverage comes from The Commonwealth Fund.
