Overview of the distribution of opioid settlement dollars, indicating implications for victims and states.
It's been many years since pharmaceutical companies – manufacturers and distributors – agreed to pay billions in settlement dollars to Americans to help them pay for the opioid epidemic, caused initially by the prescription opioids they got paid for. There was an assumption that the payments, over the course of years, would go to victims of the opioid epidemic. The payments, totaling at least $50 billion, would go to states and localities (mainly, counties). And states would decide how the payments would be spent.
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Alison Knopf (2025) studied this question.
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