Officials in Irvington, New Jersey, had an idea. To raise awareness about the dangers of opioid use and addiction, the township could host concerts with popular R&B artists like Q Parker and Musiq Soulchild. It spent more than $600,000 in 2023 and 2024 to pay for the shows, even footing the bill for VIP trailers for the performers. It bought cotton candy and popcorn machines.
In many cases, this type of community event would be unremarkable. But Irvington’s concerts stood out for their funding source: settlement money from companies accused of fueling the opioid overdose crisis.
As part of national settlements, more than a dozen companies that sold prescription painkillers are expected to pay state and local governments upward of $50 billion over nearly two decades. Governments are supposed to spend most of the windfall combating addiction. Officials who negotiated the settlements even outlined suggested uses and established other guardrails to avoid a repeat of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of the 1990s, from which paltry amounts went to anti-smoking programs.
But there’s still significant flexibility with these dollars, and what constitutes a good use to one person can be deemed waste by another.
In Irvington, township officials said they used the money appropriately because the concerts reduced stigma around addiction and connected people to treatment. But acting state Comptroller Kevin Walsh called the concerts a “waste” and “misuse” of the settlements, which resulted from the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Similar disputes are intensifying nationwide as officials begin spending settlement money in earnest — all while grappling with slashed federal grants and looming cuts to Medicaid, the state-federal public insurance program that is the largest payer for addiction treatment.
To shed light on these discussio …