EDITOR'S NOTE: Gulf States Newsroom worked with three other news outlets — KFF Health News, The Current and Verite News — to ask all 64 sheriffs in the state how they’ve spent their opioid settlement funds. The responses were shared and presented in a data table for all four newsrooms to use. The newsrooms also shared interviews with a three-person review panel, the executive counsel for the Louisiana Opioid Abatement Administration Corp. and the head of the Louisiana Sheriffs Association.
Flock cameras, DARE conferences and Dodge Durango trucks. Narcan, mobile apps and automated external defibrillators. Counseling and billboards. Medication-assisted treatment and dash cams. Public awareness campaigns. Training. Overtime. These are some of the ways that Louisiana sheriffs are spending millions of dollars in opioid settlement funds received during the first five years of payments, according to records obtained by Gulf States Newsroom in partnership with KFF Health News, The Current and Verite News.
Beginning in 2021, a series of landmark settlements with the manufacturers, marketers and distributors of opioids set off a wave of more than $50 billion in payments to local and state governments across the country in response to the opioid epidemic — the result of multi-state litigation against the companies that drove a crisis responsible for killing more than 800,000 Americans between 1999 and 2023, including thousands of Louisianans.
Louisiana is projected to receive over $621 million in settlement funds to be distributed over a 21-year period, with sheriffs receiving an estimated $124 million of that money. The settlement distributions were slated to begin in 2021, but the state did not finalize contracts and set up a payment system until early 2023, at which time local governments were given their payments for the prior two years.
Most states divided settlement funds between state and local governments, with some money going towards directed opioid remediation funds. But in 2021, then-Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, came to an agreement with groups representing sheriffs and parish and city governments, to allocate virtually all of the state’s opioid settlement dollars to local governments, the only state to do so, with sheriffs’ offices receiving 20% of that money — the largest share earmarked for law enforcement among any state.
How the sheriffs’ money is being spent is difficult to know. While parish governments are required to file annual reports detailing their opioid settlement spending with the Louisiana Opioid Abatement Task Force — the state’s relatively powerless advisory board for settlement funds — sheriffs’ offices are not. That lack of reporting means how the money is spent is largely unknown to the general public.
In an effort to close the gap in public understanding, reporters from KFF Health News, The Current, Gulf States Newsroom and Verite News teamed up and contacted every single sheriff’s office in Louisiana to ask how they’ve spent their opioid settlement funds.
According to Louisiana Opioid Abatement Task Force documents, sheriffs’ offices around the state should have received about $18.8 million from the fund as of last year. Of the 64 parishes, 43 sheriffs’ departments provided lists of their expenditures, totalling just over $8 million. Twenty sheriffs did not provide any data, for a combined $10.6 million in still-unreported opioid settlement funds — more than half of the total. One office, the DeSoto Parish Sheriff’s Office, which, according to state records should have gotten about $119,000 from the fund, said it had not received any settlement dollars yet.
Of the $8.1 million in reported expenditures, here were some of our top-line findings:
- Nearly $2 million paid for equipment used in arrests or investigations, including body cameras, crime scene cameras and drug testing equipment,
- Approximately $1.3 million paid for medical and mental health support and other assorted resources for treatment and recovery,
- Another $1.3 million paid for automated external defibrillators (AEDS),
- Over $660,000 paid for officer salaries, benefits and overtime,
- More than $439,000 paid for public awareness campaigns, including billboards, websites and mobile apps,
- Approximately $300,000 paid for vehicles and vehicle accessories.
These settlement funds are intended to help combat the devastation wrought by the opioid crisis, a crisis that has strained the public systems communities rely on.
Ahead of receiving the funds, parish governments and sheriffs signed onto a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that said opioid settlement funds should be spent on “evidence-based forward-looking strategies, programming and services” that provide treatment and support to residents with substance use disorders. But sheriffs have wide latitude in their use of this money: Any law enforcement expenditure related to the epidemic is an approved expenditure under the terms of the agreement.
Gulf States Newsroom and its partners asked a panel of three experts — a public health researcher, an addiction physician and a father who lost a son to an overdose — to review each expenditure and determine whether it was an appropriate use of opioid settlement funds: They determined that $5.4 million, or about two-thirds, of the sheriffs’ reported expenditures were not an appropriate use of funds.
Experts weigh in
To go beyond the raw numbers and get an outside assessment of whether that spending matched the intent of the settlements, we decided to bring a panel of experts to provide analysis and judgement on how sheriffs are spending their settlement dollars.
Once the expenditure data was collected, organized and formatted into a table, we stripped out identifying information and built a single, anonymized list that we shared with three people with different vantage points of the opioid crisis:
- Tricia Christensen, a public health policy researcher who has spent years watching how states spend this money,
- Stephen Loyd, an addiction medicine physician in long-term recovery who once ran Tennessee's own opioid abatement council,
- Danny Bolner Jr., also in recovery, who is raising his granddaughter in Jefferson Parish after losing his son to a fentanyl overdose.
Working independently, each member of the panel read through every line item and answered a simple question: Was this an appropriate use of opioid settlement money? If the majority voted “yes,” the expenditure was deemed appropriate by the panel.
The panel's assessment was not a legal determination of whether an expenditure complied with the state MOU. Instead, it’s an independent assessment of whether the spending fits the intended purpose of opioid settlement funds.
Of the 38 sheriffs’ offices that gave specific enough details for the panel to evaluate, 29, or three out of four, had at least one expenditure a majority of the panel called an inappropriate use of opioid settlement money. In total, the panel majority disapproved of 66% of every dollar those offices reported spending.
Thirteen parishes had everything they reported disapproved of by the majority of the panel. The pattern in what the panel rejected was consistent, whether the reviewer was a public health researcher, an addiction physician or a father who lost his son. Nearly all expenditures on vehicles or tools for criminal investigations — body cameras, dash cameras, drones, patrol vehicles, cellphone-extraction software, jail body scanners, evidence safes — were voted down by the full panel.
Terrebonne Parish spent its entire $465,000 on Flock crime cameras. Bossier Parish spent $315,776 on 130 body cameras and 50 dash cameras. St. John the Baptist put $249,442 — all of what it reported — into crime cameras and investigative software. None of the three offices, nor others with high rates of disapproved expenditures, responded to requests for comment.
"Are you telling me every crime committed in your area is specific to opioids? It's not," Loyd said of the crime camera purchases. He was similarly unmoved by vehicles for narcotics or K-9 officers: Agencies already have those, he said, "opioid crisis or not."
By contrast, nearly everything framed around treatment, counseling, recovery or education passed. Iberville Parish's contract with a counseling provider for addiction treatment in its jail was unanimously approved. So was a partnership with Freedom Ministries of Christ Church to provide addiction recovery services in Allen Parish, and a program in St. Martin Parish that connects people to treatment, family support and mental health resources.
The one category that split the panel almost every time it came up: automated external defibrillators, or AEDs. Twelve parishes spent a combined $1.3 million on the devices — more than any other single equipment category in the dataset.
Christensen and Loyd voted against nearly every AED purchase, arguing that the devices save lives during cardiac events, but do not reverse or prevent opioid overdoses, and that sheriffs’ offices should already have them. Bolner was consistently the lone yes when it came to defibrillators.
"I'd recommend having some Narcan in that kit," Bolner said of the devices. "It's good, and everybody should have them."
For Bolner, transparency was the ultimate standard: He wanted to know whether a sheriff’s office could explain specifically where every settlement dollar went.
"If he can't tell us what he's doing with it" — if a sheriff's office won't account for the spending — "that’s why it’s such a problem," Bolner said.
Loyd said he went into the review expecting to reject almost everything sheriffs purchased, based on what he's seen nationally. But he was pleasantly surprised by many of the reported expenditures — including training on how to respond to an overdose, public awareness campaigns and community outreach events pairing deputies with families around the risks of opioids.
"Law enforcement are our partners here," he said. But he rejected any expenditure that was not adequately explained.
"The vague stuff has all got to go," he said, singling out generic line items like "training" and "undercover narcotics equipment."
Untested theory
The panel could only weigh in on the spending that sheriffs' offices actually described. Twenty sheriff's offices provided no expenditure information whatsoever, and five more reported spending zero dollars of the money they'd received — together accounting for roughly $10.6 million, more than half of opioid settlement funds received so far.
That gap exists, in part, because of Louisiana’s unusual arrangement in giving one-fifth of the state’s opioid settlement dollars directly to sheriffs while not requiring them to report how they are spending it.
All recipients are required to keep records for five years, and the Louisiana Legislative Auditor is empowered to audit how they spend opioid funds. Still, a 2025 legislative audit found oversight remains thin and spending strikingly low; 21 sheriffs’ offices failed to respond to the legislative audit’s survey at all.
So far, the Louisiana Opioid Task Force and the administrators in charge of distributing money have primarily provided guidance, not oversight, on how local governments, including sheriffs, can use this money.
Curtis Nelson, the executive counsel for the Louisiana Opioid Abatement Administration Corp., said that the task force might be able to provide oversight — but their ability to do so has not yet been tested. The accountability section of the MOU sheriffs signed could, in theory, give the task force room to intervene if a sheriff strays far enough from an evidence-based abatement strategy, Nelson said. But that has not yet been put into practice.
“ And so we interpret that section to give the task force some oversight with ensuring the funds are used for their intended purposes,” Nelson said. “Now, there is no statutory authority to back up this language, however, contractually we do believe there is an avenue if the task force discovers someone is going really outside of the lines with utilization of the settlement funds.”
Until the task force has the ability to audit sheriffs’ spending, Nelson said, it has to rely almost entirely on what sheriffs volunteer.
"Up until now, the only way the task force would truly know what a sheriff's office is doing would be through that office voluntarily disclosing," he said. In the first round of annual reporting, only two of Louisiana's 64 sheriffs’ offices voluntarily submitted a report.
Nelson said the task force has consistently told sheriffs that using the money for general crime-fighting — buying equipment or covering costs a department "should have anyway" — falls outside the settlement's intent, even though the approved-use language for law enforcement is broad enough that offices keep asking.
"This funding is not for law enforcement strategies," is the guidance he said the task force gives.
The task force is now working on something Louisiana has lacked since the settlements began arriving: a written list of dos and don'ts specific to sheriffs. Nelson said the task force has studied similar guidance documents from California, Indiana and Virginia and shared them informally with sheriffs who ask for direction.
But Acadia Parish Sheriff KP Gibson, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association’s appointee to Louisiana’s Opioid Abatement Task Force, wants a Louisiana-specific version built with input from the association.
“Clarity is always good,” Gibson said. “I have no problem with having direction on what we should do with it.”
That process is expected to start later this year, with a finished document possibly ready by early 2027 — which would mean Louisiana sheriffs go at least six years into the settlement payout without formal, statewide guidance on what the money can and can't buy.
For Bolner, the wait isn't an abstraction. Every dollar spent on a camera system or a truck decal is a dollar not spent reaching a kid before they start or a parent before they lose someone the way he lost his son.
"Let's teach them," he said, of the money he'd like to see reach families like his. "Let's give them some knowledge that they can use.”
How we reported this
No state agency was tracking how Louisiana sheriffs were spending their shares of opioid settlement funds, so we decided to build a database ourselves. Starting in March, Aneri Pattini from KFF Health News, Alena Maschke from The Current, Drew Hawkins from Gulf States Newsroom and Katie Jane Fernelius from Verite News split up Louisiana's 64 parishes and spent the next several months emailing and calling every sheriff's office in the state.
We started with the task force's own accounting — its public spreadsheet showing how much settlement money each sheriff's office had received through 2025. We sent that figure to each office along with three questions: how the office was choosing to spend its share of the money, how it interacts with the opioid epidemic day to day and whether it had records documenting that spending.
Some responses came back quickly. Others took months of follow-up calls and messages. Several sheriffs never answered at all. By July, when outreach wrapped, the responses varied wildly — from itemized invoices to a one-line summary read over the phone.
Raw dollar totals only tell part of the story. They don't say whether the money went somewhere the settlements were actually meant to reach. That’s why we felt it was important to loop in outside experts to weigh in on the funding decisions of Louisiana sheriffs.
So once the outreach was done, reporters stripped every reported expenditure of the sheriff's office name attached to it and built a single, anonymized list, then sent it to three people with different vantage points on the epidemic.
We chose Tricia Christensen because of her experience researching opioid settlement funds through the lens of public health policy. Stephen Loyd was also a no-brainer, given his background as a physician who has treated people struggling with addiction and his experience running Tennessee’s version of a task force.
We also knew from the beginning that we wanted to include the perspective of someone who has lived in the fallout of the crisis itself. Danny Bolner, Jr. was kind enough to share his experience as someone in recovery and as a parent who, like so many others across the country, lost a child to an opioid overdose.
We felt these voices were not only qualified to review these spending decisions, but they represent a broad spectrum of people who know the opioid crisis intimately well.
Aneri Pattani contributed reporting to this article.
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 public health coverage comes from The Commonwealth Fund.
