Sonja Verdugo lost her husband to an opioid overdose last year. She regularly delivers medical supplies to people using drugs who are living — and dying — on the streets of Los Angeles. And she advocates at Los Angeles City Hall for policies to address addiction and homelessness.
Yet Verdugo didn’t know that hundreds of millions of dollars annually are flowing to California communities to combat the opioid crisis, a payout that began in 2022 and continues through 2038. The money comes from pharmaceutical companies that made, distributed, or sold prescription opioid painkillers and that agreed to pay about $50 billion nationwide to settle lawsuits over their role in the overdose epidemic. Even though a recent Supreme Court decision upended a settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, many other companies have already begun paying out and will continue doing so for years.
California, the most populous state, is in line for more than $4 billion. "You can walk down the street and you see someone addicted on every corner — I mean it’s just everywhere," Verdugo said. "And I’ve never even heard of the funds.
And to me, that’s crazy." Across the nation, much of this windfall has been shrouded in secrecy, with many jurisdictions offering little transparency on how they're spending the money, despite repeated queries from people in recovery and families who lost loved ones to addiction. Meanwhile, there's plenty of jockeying over how the money should be used.
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