In the heart of Appalachia, law enforcement is often seen as being on the front line of the addiction crisis.
Bre Dolan, a 35-year-old resident of Hardy County, West Virginia, understands why. Throughout her childhood, when her dad had addiction and mental health crises, police officers were often the first ones to respond. Dolan calls them “good men and women” who “care about seeing their community recover.”
But she’s skeptical that they can mitigate the root causes of an addiction epidemic that has racked her home state for decades.
“Most of the busts that go down are addicts,” she said — people who need treatment, not prison.
Dolan’s father was one of them. And so was she.
Now 14 years into recovery, she’s been surprised to see many local officials spending opioid settlement money — an influx of cash from companies accused of fueling the overdose crisis — on police Tasers, cruisers, night vision gear, and more.
“How is that really tackling an issue?” Dolan said. “How will it help families battling addiction?”
Bre Dolan is in recovery and works as an EMT in West Virginia. She says police officers in her area are good people, but she doesn’t think spending opioid settlement money on Tasers or guns is effective in combating intergenerational addiction. She’d rather the money go to hiring social workers or building family recovery programs.(Bre Dolan)
Nationwide, more than $61 million in opioid settlement funds were spent on law enforcement-related efforts in 2024, according to a yearlong investigation by KFF Health News and researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Shatterproof, a national nonprofit focused on addiction. That included initiatives that public health experts largely support, such as hiring social workers to accompany officers on overdose calls, as well as actions they’re more skeptical of, such as beefing up police arsenals.
Over nearly two decades, state and local governments are set to receive more than $50 billion in opioid settlement money, which is intended to be used to fight addiction. The settlement agreements even outlined suggested uses and established other guardrails to limit unrelated uses of the funds — as happened with the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of the 1990s.
But there’s still significant flexibility with these dollars, and what constitutes a good use to one person can be deemed waste by another.
To Stephen Loyd, an addiction medicine doctor who was once addicted to opio …