Rx Summit 2022

Opioid Settlement: Guidance to Community Policymakers

Monday, April 18, 2022

1:00 PM – 2:15 PM ET

Location: Grand Ballroom ED

Presenter(s)

Jacqueline E. Hackett, MPP, MPH

Deputy Chief of Staff
Office of National Drug Control Policy
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Washington, District of Columbia
Joshua Sharfstein, MD

Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Baltimore, Maryland
Steve Mange, JD, MA

Senior Policy Counsel & Interim Legislative Counsel
North Carolina Department of Justice
Raleigh, NC
Heidi K. Williams, MPA

Director of Opioid Response
Colorado Attorney General
Denver, CO

Moderator(s)

Robert L. DuPont, MD

President
Institute for Behavior and Health, Inc.
Georgetown University School of Medicine, and Member, Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit Advisory Board
Rockville, Maryland

States, counties, communities, and tribes across the country will soon be making significant decisions about how to best utilize the forthcoming opioid litigation settlement funds. The estimated $40 billion in completed or proposed settlement dollars has the potential to provide critical assistance to communities and populations that have been most impacted by addiction and the overdose epidemic. Over the last two decades, the overdose epidemic has taken over 500,000 lives, and 2020 has seen sharp increases in overdose-related fatalities. In addition to the loss of human life, the Society of Actuaries found that the cost of the overdose epidemic in the United States was $630 billion from 2015 to 2018, and the White House Council of Economic Advisors put the one-year economic impact of fatal overdose at a cost of nearly $500 billion. The dollars from the opioid litigation come at a critical time as the demand for evidence-based interventions and support increase, states, and localities have new funding streams available to save lives.

This session will outline a set of nationally supported principles to guide decisions about using settlement funds, provide an overview of tools to access community needs and concerns related to substance use disorder and overdose, and highlight tools, resources, and best practices for collaboration between providers and state, local, county, and tribal governments to deliver evidence-based care and services.

Learning Objectives:

Apply assessment tools and evidence to make decisions on how to best utilize this new funding
Identify the role of the Department of Health and Human Services in recouping Medicaid dollars spent to address the overdose epidemic in the states, and account for this in their planning
Organize across multiple levels of government to use this new funding to add to (and not replace) existing spending to accomplish transformational change
Identify tools, resources, and best practices to help states, counties, and communities make the most of opioid settlement funds
Prepare to track expenditures to provide a layer of transparency that was not in existence with the tobacco settlement funds