Dubious buys raise alarm over local control of opioid cash

November 12, 2026 / 5:00 AM EST / KFF Health News

State and local governments spent about $3.7 billion in opioid settlement funds last year. That's more than the median annual income of 42,000 American families combined.

The money comes from companies that were sued for aggressively pushing painkillers and fueling the opioid crisis.

Large amounts went to addiction treatment, recovery housing, and other initiatives that many public health researchers and families affected by the crisis agree fit the spirit of the settlements — to save lives and remediate the problem.

But other expenditures had tenuous ties to addiction, including:

KFF Health News uncovered these expenditures and about 17,500 others through a yearlong investigation with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Shatterproof, a national nonprofit focused on addiction. The team filed public records requests, scoured government websites, and extracted expenditures, which were then sorted into categories such as treatment or prevention. The result is the most comprehensive national database documenting how opioid settlement money was used (or left unspent) in 2025.

The pot of settlement cash, which many addiction survivors and their advocates consider "blood money," is expected to total about $60 billion over nearly two decades.

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/healthwatch/