Sonja Verdugo lost her husband to an opioid overdose last 12 months. She often delivers medical supplies to drug addicts living – and dying – on the streets of Los Angeles. And she advocates for measures to combat addiction and homelessness at Los Angeles City Hall.
But Verdugo didn't know that a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of dollars are being poured into California communities every year to combat the opioid crisis, with disbursement starting in 2022 and lasting through 2038.
The money comes from pharmaceutical corporations that manufactured, distributed or sold prescription opioid painkillers and have agreed to pay about $50 billion nationwide to settle lawsuits over their role within the overdose epidemic. Although a recent Supreme Court decision an agreement turned on its head including OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, quite a few other corporations have already begun paying out and can proceed to accomplish that for years to come back.
California, essentially the most populous state, is about to greater than 4 billion US dollars.
“You can walk down the street and see an addict on every corner – I mean, it's just everywhere,” Verdugo said. “And I've never heard of the funds. And to me, that's crazy.”
Across the country, much of this windfall is shrouded in secrecy, and plenty of jurisdictions offers little transparency about how they spend the cash, despite repeated requests from people in recovery and families who’ve lost family members to addiction.
Meanwhile, there may be much debate about how the cash must be used. Companies are promoting the spending of funds on products starting from capped medicine bottles to full-body scanners for screening prison inmates. Local officials often advocate for the areas they represent, whether that’s treatment, prevention or harm reduction. And some governments are using the cash to Closing budget gaps.
In California, local governments must report how they spend the settlement funds to the state Department of Health, but there is no such thing as a requirement to make these reports public.
California Healthline obtained copies of the documents through a public records request and is now making available for the primary time 265 local government spending reports for the 2022-23 fiscal 12 months. These are essentially the most recent reports filed.
The reports provide an outline of initial spending priorities and tensions.
Naloxone an early winner
As of June 2023, nearly all of the opioid settlement funds controlled by California cities and counties – greater than $200 million – had not been spent, the reports show. It is a problem nationwide response since the officials need time to seek the advice of.
The City And district Los Angeles accounted for nearly a fifth of that unspent amount, or nearly $39 million, although officials say because the report was released they’ve begun allocating the cash to rehabilitation housing and programs that connect homeless individuals with residential addiction treatment facilities.
Among local governments that truly used the cash in the primary fiscal 12 months, the preferred spending item was naloxone, a drug designed to reverse opioid overdoses and infrequently known by the brand name Narcan. The drug accounted for greater than $2 million in spending on 19 projects.
One of those projects was carried out in Union City within the San Francisco Bay Area. The community with about 72,000 inhabitants had five suspected fentanyl overdosestwo of them fatal, inside 24 hours in September.
The money from the opioid case settlement is “invaluable,” says Corina Hahn, town's director of community and recreation services. said in her report“The availability of these resources has helped educate, train and distribute Narcan kits to parents, youth and school staff.”
Union City purchased 500 kits, each containing two doses of naloxone. The kits cost about $13,500, with one other $56,000 earmarked for similar projects, including backpacks containing Narcan kits and training materials for prime school students.
Union City also plans to expand its outreach to the homeless to fund drug education and rehabilitation services, including addiction counseling.
These are the sorts of life-saving services that Verdugo, the Los Angeles activist, says are urgently needed because the variety of deaths amongst people living on the streets continues to rise.
In June of last 12 months, she lost her husband of 46 years, Jesse Baumgartner, who suffered from an addiction that began after he was prescribed painkillers for a wrestling injury in highschool. For six years, he tried to kick his addiction with methadone, but every time doctors reduced his dosage, cravings drove him back to illegal drugs.
“It was just a horrible roller coaster ride that he couldn't get out of,” Verdugo said.
At that time, the couple had already been homeless for 4 and a half years and had been living in everlasting accommodation for about two years.
Fentanyl use, especially among the many homeless, “is just rampant,” she said. People sometimes unknowingly come into contact with the low cost, highly addictive substance when it's mixed with something else.
“Once they start, it’s like they can’t go back,” says Verdugo, who works as a community organizer for Floor game LA.
That's why she leaves boxes of naloxone in homeless camps within the hope of saving lives.
“They definitely use it because that's when it's needed – they can't wait for the ambulance to come,” she said.
Cities cut spending on law enforcement
In contrast, the cities Irvine And River bankeach within the greater Los Angeles area, listed plans to prioritize law enforcement through the acquisition portable drug analyzersalthough neither city did so in its first fiscal 12 months, 2022-23. Their inclination mirrored patterns in other parts of the country, with hundreds of thousands in settlement funds flows to police stations and prisons.
But this use of the cash has sparked controversy, and each cities withdrew from purchasing the drug analyzer after the Department of Health Care Services rules issued that funds from settlements in opioid cases can’t be used for certain law enforcement activities. The rules specifically excluded “devices used to preserve evidence for law enforcement purposes, such as the TruNarc Handheld Narcotics Analyzer.”
After the state declared that BolaWraps weren’t an allowable expense, town said it might find other sources of funding to pay the remaining installments.
Santa Rosa, within the Californian wine region, spent nearly $30,000 for the well-being and support of cops.
The funds enabled the police to strengthen their Contracted Wellness Coordinator from a part-time to a full-time position and to buy a mobile device to measure electrical activity within the brain, said spokeswoman Sergeant Patricia Seffens.
The goal is to make use of the technology with cops to “better assess the traumatic impact of responding to increasing overdose calls,” Seffens said in an email.
In Dublin, east of San Francisco, officials are using a part of the $62,000 settlement for a DARE program.
DARE stands for Education about drug resistanceis a series of courses taught by cops in schools to encourage students to withstand peer pressure and avoid drugs. It was originally developed throughout the “Just Say No” campaign within the Eighties.
Studies have shown inconsistent results from this system and no long-term consequences on drug use, leading many researchers to check with it as “ineffective.”
However, on its website, DARE cites studies because the program was updated in 2009 that found:a positive effect“ in fifth graders and “statistically significant reductions“ in drinking and smoking approximately four months after completing the program.
“When the DARE program first came out, it looked very different than it does today,” said Nate Schmidt, Dublin Police Chief.
Schmidt said additional settlement funds can be used to distribute naloxone to the community and keep it stocked in schools and municipal facilities.
Other local governments in California spent modest amounts on a big selection of addiction-related measures. Ukiah in Mendocino County north of San Francisco $11,000 spent for a brand new heating and air-con system for a neighborhood drug treatment center. Orange And Saint Matthew Counties spent among the settlement money on medication-assisted treatment for inmates of their prisons. The city of Oceanside $16,000 spent to showcase drug prevention artwork and videos created by middle school students in local movie theaters, public places, and on buses and taxis.
The Ministry of Health said it plans to publish a nationwide report on using funds, in addition to reports from individual cities and counties, by the top of the 12 months.
Originally published:
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