Baltimore’s Board of Estimates approved $14.6 million dollars in funding to combat opioid overdoses in the city and set up the governance structure to implement plans to responsibly spend the windfall of money Baltimore will receive in settlements from opioid companies over the next decade and a half.
The permitted funds, which partially come from the city’s settlements with companies like CVS and Allergan, will go to a host of different programs that will directly impact the health of the city. Other parts of the appropriation will set up administrative structures like an opioid restitution board that will make recommendations on how the city should spend the settlement money it receives.
“Our goal here is to expand the duration and the impact of the dollars. This is a life-changing amount of money to be able to invest back into these programs,” said Laura Larsen, the city’s finance director. “Our goal here is to be able to leverage returns from the funds that we are receiving in order to expand the duration of the dollars for no less than 15 years.”
About $2.5 million will go to scaling up Baltimore Health Department’s opioid response.
Another $2.1 million will go to oversight of contracts and grants, and $270,000 will go to staffing administrative roles for contractual support and administering grants.
Other funds will go to planning and designing new health clinics and putting money into services regarding opioid response.
Baltimore is in the process of setting up a trust fund and governance structure to handle the hundreds of millions of dollars the city won from opioid companies through a handful of settlements.
In August Mayor Brandon Scott signed an executive order to oversee how the funds will be spent.
With the executive order, the city states that the funds will be used purely for substance abuse and overdose programs and services. That includes treatment, recovery, harm reduction and social determinants to health associated with the opioid epidemic. The order also sanctions the use of the funds for infrastructure relating to those programs and their evaluation.
The money can go to both governmental and private organizations for those purposes.
The city will create an opioid restitution advisory board to recommend the best way to spend those funds.
Baltimore decided not to sign onto the global settlement which distributed more than $50 billion nationally. Instead, the city decided to sue the drug manufacturers on its own.
“Here in Baltimore, we have been disproportionately impacted — particularly due to the actions of reckless bad actors in big pharma,” Scott said. “We made the decision to see our litigation against these companies through until the very end, foregoing the global settlements that were offered along the way, because we knew how impacted our community has been and how important it was to see adequate financial accountability from these companies.”
So far, the city has won $668 million dollars in settlements and court awards. However, the city is seeking more than $5 billion from McKesson and AmerisourceBergen (now Cencora), the only companies it went to court with, to mitigate the harm they caused during the height of the opioid epidemic. Last month, a jury found the companies partially responsible for a public nuisance caused by the misuse of prescription opioids.
Baltimore officials submitted a more than 90-page plan to the court that they say will bring down overdose fatalities by 23% over the next 15 years.
The plan includes Naloxone vending machines, overdose prevention sites, wound care kits and investment in drug treatment programs.
