{"id":1314,"date":"2025-11-03T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dangeladvertising.com\/?p=1314"},"modified":"2025-11-07T15:04:58","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T15:04:58","slug":"sock-hops-and-concerts-how-some-places-spent-opioid-settlement-cash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dangeladvertising.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/03\/sock-hops-and-concerts-how-some-places-spent-opioid-settlement-cash\/","title":{"rendered":"Sock Hops and Concerts: How Some Places Spent Opioid Settlement Cash"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> and 2024<\/a> to pay for the shows, even footing the bill for VIP trailers for the performers. It bought cotton candy and popcorn machines.<\/p>\n

In many cases, this type of community event would be unremarkable. But Irvington\u2019s concerts stood out for their funding source: settlement money from companies accused of fueling the opioid overdose crisis.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> over nearly two decades. Governments are supposed to spend most of the windfall combating addiction. Officials who negotiated the settlements even outlined suggested uses<\/a> and established other guardrails to avoid a repeat of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of the 1990s, from which paltry amounts<\/a> went to anti-smoking programs.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s still significant flexibility with these dollars, and what constitutes a good use to one person can be deemed waste by another.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> called the concerts a \u201cwaste\u201d and \u201cmisuse\u201d of the settlements, which resulted from the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.<\/p>\n

Similar disputes are intensifying nationwide as officials begin spending settlement money in earnest \u2014 all while grappling with slashed federal grants<\/a> and looming cuts to Medicaid<\/a>, the state-federal public insurance program that is the largest payer<\/a> for addiction treatment.<\/p>\n

To shed light on these discussions, KFF Health News and researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health<\/a> and Shatterproof<\/a>, a national nonprofit focused on addiction, conducted a yearlong effort to document settlement spending in 2024. The team filed public records requests, scoured government websites, and extracted expenditures, which were then sorted into categories<\/a> such as treatment or prevention.<\/p>\n

The result is a database of more than 10,500 ways settlement cash was used (or not) last year \u2014 the most comprehensive national resource of its kind. Some highlights include:<\/p>\n