The advertising and marketing pitches are daring and arriving quick: Invest opioid settlement {dollars} in a lasso-like gadget to assist police detain individuals with out Tasers or pepper spray. Pour cash into psychedelics, electrical stimulation gadgets, and different experimental therapies for habit. Fund analysis into new, supposedly abuse-deterrent opioids and splurge on costly, brand-name naloxone.
The cash is coming from an array of firms that made, offered, or distributed prescription painkillers, together with Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergen, and Walgreens. Thousands of state and native governments sued the businesses for aggressively selling and distributing opioid medicines, fueling an epidemic that progressed to heroin and fentanyl and has killed greater than half one million Americans. The settlement cash, arriving over practically twenty years, is supposed to remediate the results of that company conduct.
But because the {dollars} land in authorities coffers — greater than $4.3 billion as of early November — a swarm of personal, public, nonprofit, and for-profit entities are eyeing the gold rush. Some individuals worry that firms, particularly — with their flashy merchandise, strong advertising and marketing budgets, and starvation for income — will now gobble up the windfall meant to rectify it.
“They see a money cow,” mentioned JK Costello, director of behavioral well being consulting for the Steadman Group, a agency that’s being paid to assist native governments administer the settlements in Colorado, Kansas, Oregon, and Virginia. “Everyone is .”
Costello receives a number of emails every week from companies and nonprofits searching for steering on easy methods to apply for the funds. To sustain with the inflow, he has developed an ordinary response: Thanks, however we will not reply to particular person requests, so this is a hyperlink to your locality’s web site, public assembly schedule, or software portal.
KFF Health News obtained electronic mail information in eight states that present well being departments, sheriffs’ workplaces, and councils overseeing settlement funds are receiving an identical deluge of messages. In the emails, advertising and marketing specialists supply telephone calls, informational displays, and conferences with their firms.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall just lately despatched a letter reminding native officers to vet organizations that attain out. “I’m positive that lots of you will have already been approached by a wide range of distributors searching for funding for opioid initiatives,” he wrote. “Please proceed with warning.”
Of course, not all advertising and marketing efforts ought to immediate concern. Emails and calls are a technique individuals in energy study progressive services and products. The nation’s habit disaster is simply too giant for the general public sector to tame alone, and plenty of stakeholders agree that partnering with business is essential. After all, pharmaceutical firms manufacture medicines to deal with opioid habit. Corporations run remedy amenities and telehealth companies.
“It’s unrealistic and even dangerous to say we do not need any cash going to any personal firms,” mentioned Kristen Pendergrass, vice chairman of state coverage at Shatterproof, a nationwide nonprofit centered on habit.
The key, agree public well being and coverage consultants, is to critically consider services or products to see if they’re essential, evidence-based, and sustainable — as a substitute of flocking to firms with the very best advertising and marketing.
Otherwise, “you find yourself with a lot of shiny objects,” Costello mentioned.
And, in the end, failure to do due diligence may go away some jurisdictions holding an empty bag.
Take North Carolina. In 2022, state lawmakers allotted $1.85 million of settlement funds for a pilot challenge utilizing the primary FDA-approved app for opioid use dysfunction, developed by Pear Therapeutics. There had been excessive hopes the app would assist individuals keep in remedy longer.
But lower than a 12 months later, Pear Therapeutics filed for chapter.
The state hadn’t paid the corporate but, so the cash isn’t misplaced, in keeping with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. But the division and lawmakers haven’t determined what to do with these {dollars} subsequent.
$1 million for drug disposal pouches
Jason Sundby, CEO of Verde Environmental Technologies, mentioned the Deterra pouches his firm sells are a low-cost approach to forestall costly addictions.
Customers place their unused medicines in a Deterra pouch and add water, deactivating the medication earlier than tossing them, making certain they can’t be used even when fished out of the trash. A medium Deterra pouch prices $3.89 and holds 45 capsules.
The objective is to “get these medication out of individuals’s properties earlier than they are often misused, diverted, and other people begin down the trail of needing remedy or naloxone or emergency room visits,” Sundby mentioned.
Sundby’s firm ran an advert about spending settlement {dollars} on its product in a National Association of Counties e-newsletter and featured related data on-line.
It could also be paying off, as Deterra is about to obtain $1 million in settlement funds from the well being division in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and $12,000 from the sheriff’s workplace in Henry County, Iowa. The firm additionally has partnerships with St. Croix and Milwaukee counties in Wisconsin, and is engaged on a deal in Connecticut.
Several different firms with related merchandise have additionally used their product websites to induce jurisdictions to contemplate the settlements as a funding stream — they usually’re seeing early success.
DisposeRx makes a drug deactivation product — its model prices a few greenback every — and obtained $144,000 in South Carolina for mailing 134,000 disposal packets to a program that educated highschool soccer gamers, coaches, and fogeys about habit.
SafeRx makes $3 capsule bottles with a locking code to retailer medicines and was awarded $189,000 by South Carolina’s opioid settlement council to work with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office and native prevention teams. It additionally received smaller awards from Weld and Custer counties in Colorado.
None of the businesses mentioned they’re depending on opioid settlements to maintain their enterprise long-term. But the funds present a brief increase. In a 2022 presentation to potential traders, SafeRx known as the opioid settlements a “development catalyst.”
Critics of such investments say the merchandise should not worthwhile. Today’s disaster of deadly overdoses is essentially pushed by illicit fentanyl. Even if research recommend the businesses’ merchandise make individuals extra prone to safely retailer and dispose of medicines, that is unlikely to stem the report ranges of deaths seen lately.
“The believable mechanism by which they’d even have the ability to cut back overdose is a thriller as a result of prescription medicines should not driving overdose,” mentioned Tricia Christensen, coverage director with the nonprofit Community Education Group, which is monitoring settlement spending throughout Appalachia.
Safe storage and disposal will be completed with a locking cupboard and bathroom, she mentioned. The FDA lists opioids on its flush record for disposal and says there isn’t a proof that low ranges of the medicines that find yourself in rivers hurt human well being.
But Milton Cohen, CEO of SafeRx’s father or mother firm, Caring Closures International, mentioned protecting prescription medicines safe addresses the foundation of the epidemic. Fentanyl kills, however typically the place individuals begin, “the place water is coming into the boat nonetheless, is the drugs cupboard,” he mentioned. “We can bail all we would like, however the appropriate factor to do is to plug the outlet first.”
Products to safe and dispose of medicine additionally present a chance for training and destigmatization, mentioned Melissa Lyon, director of the Delaware County Health Department in Pennsylvania. The county can be mailing Deterra pouches and postcards about stopping habit to three-quarters of its residents.
“The Deterra pouch is to me a direct correlation” to the overprescribing that got here from pharmaceutical firms’ aggressive advertising and marketing, she added. Since the settlement cash is to compensate for that, “it is a good use of the funds.”
Tools for regulation enforcement that superheroes would envy
Other companies making pitches for settlement funds have a much less clear relationship to opioids.
Wrap Technologies creates instruments for regulation enforcement to scale back deadly makes use of of drive. Its chief product, the BolaWrap, shoots a 7½-foot Kevlar tether greater than a dozen toes by way of the air till it wraps round an individual’s limbs or torso — virtually like Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth.
Terry Nichols, director of enterprise growth for the corporate, mentioned the BolaWrap can be utilized as a substitute for Tasers or pepper spray when officers have to detain somebody experiencing a psychological well being disaster or committing crimes associated to their habit, like housebreaking.
“If you wish to be extra humane in the best way you deal with individuals in substance use dysfunction and disaster, that is an possibility,” he mentioned.
The firm posts physique digital camera footage of officers utilizing BolaWrap on YouTube and says that out of 192 subject stories of its use, about 75% of conditions had been resolved with out further use of drive.
When officers de-escalate conditions, persons are much less prone to find yourself in jail, Nichols mentioned. And diverting individuals from the felony justice system is among the many prompt investments in opioid settlement agreements.
That argument satisfied town of Brownwood, Texas, the place Nichols was police chief till 2019. It has spent about $15,000 of opioid settlement funds to purchase 9 BolaWrap gadgets.
“Our objective is to keep away from utilizing drive when a citizen is in want,” mentioned James Fuller, assistant police chief in Brownwood. “If we will take somebody to get assist, the very last thing we wish to do is poke holes in them with a Taser.”
After Brownwood’s buy, Wrap Technologies issued a press launch during which CEO Kevin Mullins inspired extra regulation enforcement businesses to “take the chance afforded by the opioid settlement funds to empower their officers.” The firm has additionally despatched a two-page doc to police departments explaining how settlement funds can be utilized to purchase BolaWraps.
Language from that doc appeared practically word-for-word in a briefing sheet given to Brownwood City Council earlier than the BolaWrap buy. The council voted unanimously in favor.
But the method hasn’t been as clean elsewhere. In Hawthorne, California, the police division deliberate to purchase 80 BolaWrap gadgets utilizing opioid settlement funds. It paid its first installment of about $25,000 in June. However, it was later knowledgeable by the state Department of Health Care Services that the BolaWrap isn’t an allowable use of those {dollars}.
“Bola Wraps won’t be bought with the Settlement Funds sooner or later,” Hawthorne City Clerk Dayna Williams-Hunter wrote in an electronic mail.
Carolyn Williams, a member of the advocacy group Vocal-TX, mentioned she does not see how the gadgets will tackle the overdose disaster in Texas or elsewhere.
Her son Haison Akiem Williams handled psychological well being and habit points for years. Without insurance coverage, he could not afford rehab. When he sought case administration companies, there was a three-month wait, she mentioned. Police charged him with misdemeanors however by no means related him to care, she mentioned.
In February, he died of an overdose at age 47. His mom misses how he used to make her snigger by calling her “Ms. Carol.”
She desires settlement funds to assist companies she thinks may have stored him alive: psychological well being remedy, case administration, and housing. BolaWrap does not make that record.
“It’s heartbreaking to see what the federal government is doing with this cash,” she mentioned. “Putting it in locations they actually don’t want it.”
|
|
