Guides for Community Advocates on the Opioid Settlements

Opioid settlement funds provide a critical opportunity for enhanced investment in strategies to counter a national overdose crisis. Community participation – especially by those disproportionately affected by the overdose crisis and War on Drugs – can help promote spending that is more equitable and more responsive to communities who need it most.

Christine Minhee of OpioidSettlementTracker.com and the Vital Strategies Overdose Prevention Program have partnered to provide a comprehensive update and expansion of the opioid settlement guides for all 50 states and the District of Columbia initially released in Summer 2023.

The opioid settlement guides on this website will demystify how each state will receive and allocate opioid settlement funds. The goal is to empower on-the-ground community advocates so that they may effectively understand and engage with their states’ and localities’ opioid settlement planning and spending processes.

We hope these guides will serve as a critical resource to community members, in addition to journalists, policymakers, and the public at large.

Guides for Community Advocates

Each state-specific guide answers the following questions for each intrastate share:

• Where exactly do my state’s opioid settlement monies live?

• Who ultimately decides how my state’s opioid settlement funds are spent (e.g., advisory council members, state legislatures, health departments, local government officials)?

• What may my state’s opioid settlements be spent on, and what processes must be followed as they are spent?

• Has my state established an opioid settlement advisory body? And is that body required to include member(s) with lived and/or living experience?

• Can I provide input on spending? Are my state’s decisionmakers required to hear the public’s input on opioid settlement spend?

• Are any of my state’s opioid settlements at risk of being used to supplant existing health resources?

• Where should I go for updates, and what are key opioid settlement spending resources I should know about in my state?

What’s new in the 2024 update?

States and localities have continued to refine their spending goals and processes as they spend their first few settlement payments. The guides have all received a comprehensive update and contain new and essential information, including recently enacted legislation, changes to decision-making processes, and recent input opportunities. Many of the guides also reflect important insights and clarifications as reported by the states themselves. Read more about our methodology here.

Opioid Settlement Funds: State-Level Guides

Click on a state below or select a state in the drop-down menu at the top of the page to access its comprehensive guide on opioid settlement funds:

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas	Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina	North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

The state guides are a living resource that we will periodically adjust as new information becomes available. These discrete modifications do not reflect a comprehensive update of a guide's contents. The "Last revised [date]" at the top of each state guide's summary landing page indicates when the state guide last received a comprehensive update. The gray "Last updated [time frame]" text at the bottom of each page indicates when we last made a discrete adjustment to that specific page.

The volume and constantly changing nature of information in the state guides makes broken/outdated links and typographical/formatting errors more likely. We encourage you to use the Contact Us form to report any issues or alert us to important changes in a state's opioid settlement landscape.

Acknowledgments

Development of the Opioid Settlement Funds: State-Level Guides for Community Advocates was led by OpioidSettlementTracker.com (Christine Minhee, founder) and the Vital Strategies Overdose Prevention Program (Kate Boulton, senior legal technical advisor, and Derek Carr, legal technical advisor). Christine Minhee, Kate Boulton, and Derek Carr were also responsible for researching and writing each guide.

OpioidSettlementTracker.com and Vital Strategies also wish to acknowledge the enormous contribution of Ari Edelman McHenry to the creation of the original state-level guides for community advocates published in Summer 2023.