The marketing pitches are bold and arriving fast: Invest opioid settlement dollars in a lasso-like device to help police detain people without Tasers or pepper spray. Pour money into psychedelics, electrical stimulation devices, and other experimental treatments for addiction. Fund research into new, supposedly abuse-deterrent opioids and splurge on expensive, brand-name naloxone.
These pitches land daily in the inboxes of state and local officials in charge of distributing more than $50 billion from settlements in opioid lawsuits.
The money is coming from an array of companies that made, sold, or distributed prescription painkillers, including Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergen, and Walgreens. Thousands of state and local governments sued the companies for aggressively promoting and distributing opioid medications, fueling an epidemic that progressed to heroin and fentanyl and has killed more than half a million Americans. The settlement money, arriving over nearly two decades, is meant to remediate the effects of that corporate behavior.
But as the dollars land in government coffers — more than $4.3 billion as of early November — a swarm of private, public, nonprofit, and for-profit entities are eyeing the gold rush. Some people fear that corporations, in particular — with their flashy products, robust marketing budgets, and hunger for profits — will now gobble up the windfall meant to rectify it.
“They see a cash cow,” said JK Costello, director of behavioral health consulting for the Steadman Group, a firm that is being paid to help local governments administer the settlements in Colorado, Kansas, Oregon, and Virginia. “Everyone is interested.”