OpioidSettlementTracker.com’s official sum of settlements reached between U.S. state and local governments and the 16 major pharmaceutical opioid manufacturers, marketers, distributors, and retailers:
$54.9 billion (total reported value)
To see how these monies are being spent, click on your state:
Last updated April 28, 2024. Detailed notes on the calculations reflected in the “State/Local” column are here; narrative histories of some of the saucier lead-ups to these settlement amounts are here. If you see something I’ve missed, email Tips@OpioidSettlementTracker.com.
A note about usage: The information presented herein exists in the public domain, but the compilations themselves belong to me. I create my datasets for public, beneficial uses, so each of them sit under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which allows you to “remix, adapt, and build upon [the above] non-commercially” provided that two things occur: (1) I am credited in the process (“Christine Minhee, J.D., OpioidSettlementTracker.com”), and (2) you license whatever you produce using my help under identical terms. Happy to discuss. All rights reserved.
“With Big Tobacco’s cautionary tale shadowing these debates, the issue of accountability looms. Who ensures that grantees spend their money appropriately? What sanctions will befall those who color outside the lines of their grants?
So far, the answers remain to be seen. Christine Minhee, a lawyer who runs the Opioid Settlement Tracker, which analyzes state approaches to spending the funds, noted that on that question, the voluminous legal agreements could be opaque.
‘But between the lines, the settlement agreements themselves imply that the political process, rather than the courts, will bear the actual enforcement burden,’ she said. ‘This means that the task of enforcing the spirit of the agreement — making sure that settlements are spent in ways that maximize lives saved — is left to the rest of us.’”
— "Opioid Settlement Money Is Being Spent on Police Cars and Overtime" (The New York Times)
WOULD YOU LIKE AN EXPLANATION OF EVERY SINGLE STATE’S OPIOID SETTLEMENT SPENDING APPROACH?
Vital Strategies and I created an encyclopedic set of guides to equip community advocates with expert-level analyses of the many opioid settlement spending plans I’ve been tracking since 2021.
State-Level Guides for Community Advocates on Opioid Settlements
Vital Strategies’ Kate Boulton and I discuss the guides here:
For a birds-eye view of the major opioid settlements reached thus far:
The Official Opioid Settlement Tracker Tally (NEW!)
States’ Opioid Settlement Statuses
For a glimpse into how state and local governments are planning to spend their opioid settlement funds:
States’ Opioid Settlement Allocation Plans
And for those working to maximize evidence-based spend:
And for those looking to remember why the opioid litigation exists in the first place:
America is a country founded on opium-fueled dreams. “Thomas Jefferson planted poppy at Monticello,” and John Adams “gossiped that Alexander Hamilton owed his eloquence to a ‘bit of opium in his mouth.’” Our first multi-millionaire made his fortune pumping opium into China in the early 1800s. And an “astounding range” of our cultural and educational institutions — from the Guggenheim to Harvard — are funded by the Sacklers, who made their billions pumping opioids into America.
But if you’re awake to the deeper issues at play in the American opioid crisis — the brutality of capitalism as applied to healthcare, the futility of regulatory paternalism when federal agency-approved drugs end up fueling demand for cartel heroin — you might see its related litigation as one big, lucid nightmare.
We live in a world that mistakes data possession for understanding, which means you’ve likely had the crisis explained to you in numbers: the 841,000 deaths from drug overdoses — over 2/3 involving opioids — since 1999; the 3,300 state and local lawsuits against “big pharma” opioid manufacturers, distributors, and retailers; the multimillion-dollar judgments; and those $26 billion global settlement talks, each renegotiation fraught with the anxieties of government officials who know — in truly laugh-cry fashion — that there’s little way to ensure that these defendant-corporations aren’t also deceptively marketing the value of their own offers.
I’m sorry about the numbers: I know that the briefest exposure to a low dosage of opioid crisis-related data can produce powerful fact fatigue. But wide awake are the Americans who have lost or live in fear of losing a loved one to an overdose, each of whom are disturbed to find the billion-dollar settlements they read about in the news neither represent — nor are likely to recompense — them directly as plaintiffs.
And wide awake are those attuned to the reality that the races of those dying have often determined whether a public health or punitive approach is used to respond to their struggle. Comparing the public health-bent media coverage of infants born with neonatal abstinence syndrome today against the radicalized “crack baby” headlines of the eighties generates a fair amount of cognitive dissonance — one rivaled only by the fact that states spend less than 3% of their big tobacco settlement winnings on tobacco-related health causes, and there exist no guarantees that states will spend their opioid settlement winnings any better.
If you feel sleepy just thinking about this “elephantine mass” of opioid lawsuits today, that’s by design. We’re supposed to dream of lucrative settlements with opioid corporations in order to stay narcoleptic against the terrifying reality that we’re suing them in part because our federal regulators — who unlike corporations are tasked to protect us and not shareholders — prioritized the pursuit of profit over public health at pivotal moments, and looked away as the black market started boiling over in earnest.
If our 400,000 lives lost kept us in the state of vigilance they deserved, however, we’d eventually the ask the question that should jolt us all awake:
If preventable drug overdoses can claim more American lives than the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars did abroad, is our government by and for the health of its people, or for profit?
This is how the opioid crisis — particularly its litigation — functions as a byzantine tower of political Babel. Its mystique derives from the ability to trick you into thinking that you’re missing something for finding it so ridiculous.
But you aren’t ridiculous. The opioid crisis is ridiculous. And the resources here at the Opioid Settlement Tracker are your after-hours, underground tour of that ridiculous tower, which isn’t so imposing once viewed from inside.
You ready to climb?
The Basics
Legal Details of Opioid Settlement Funds
Is any of the funding allocated specifically to nonprofit efforts, or is it all funneled to and through the states and local governments? →
Are there tribal government settlements too? →
How do opioid settlements compare to the big tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA)? →
Where can we get updates on the settlement agreements and ability to access funding at the state or local level? →
Who at the localities makes the actual decision where these monies are spent? Does it differ? How can we advocate, and to whom? →
Will the states be able to handle the large sums of funding? →
What department at the state level would typically receive and distribute the funds? →
What, if anything, will stop the federal, state, and local governments from replacing baseline spending for opioid remediation with the opioid settlement funds? →