Our approach to the opioid settlement money is multifaceted. Through our research, we understand what is (and isn't) happening with this money. Though our advocay, we collaborate with key partners to advance evidence-based spending, transparent and accountable processes, and community informed decisions.
So we've been working to make sure it's spent effectively and ethically. The only way to ensure this happens is by having transparency and accountability measures in place to reduce waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement (WFAM). We built this page to support community members interested in WFAM and policy makers looking for help ending WFAM.
Our goal is that all opioid settlement money is aligned with the intention of the opioid lawsuits: restorative justice.
To meet this goal, we provide strategic guidance through our education and consulting services.
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In the few instances where we have transparency into opioid settlement spending we are finding what we all dreaded.
A chunk of the opioid settlement money is being wasted. And little is being done about it.
To help ensure ethical and effective spending we need to put information about opioid settlement waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement (WFAM) in front of the people who can do something about it: elected officials.
But finding out how to alert people to these these issues proved to be nearly impossible.
To address these gaps, were launching a set of first-of-its-kind resources to make it as easy as possible for you to report WFAM to oversight authorities.
But we also need your help advocating for improved accountability mechanisms in our state and local government. To improve spending and eliminate WFAM we need transparency and accountability mechanisms.
We advocate for:
As part of this research we produced a whitepaper with Popular Democracy in Action about the legal justification for asking the government to hold decision makers accountable for WFAM (parens patriae) and discussed our methods for finding the information that informed these resources.
We appreciate your interest in this topic and hope you can contribute to this work below!
This form collects structured data (from you?) about opioid settlement waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. With your help we can create the most comprehensive database of spending issues. It takes less than 5 minutes to report an issue. All verified submissions live in our WFAM Database below. After submitting this form, we connect you with the relevant information to submit a complaint to your government. Want to skip this and go straight to reporting to your government? See here!
This first of its kind database connects you with the right people in your state government or US territory to report spending issues. Fill out the form above to get started reporting issues or start here to find contact info for your state/territory. We keep it up-to-date to make it easy for you to get this info into the right persons hands.
This crowdsourced database pulls in submissions from above (Crowdsourcing Opioid Settlement WFAM) and our research into spending. It is the most comprehensive database of problematic opioid settlement spending.
The only way we're going to see governments adopt opioid settlement accountability mechanisms is if you reach out. Search for your state or territory to find out who to contact to help them improve their processes. We provide suggested language and contact information for your AG office + state-run opioid settlement website so they we can encourage them to align with our accountability goals. If you submit to the WFAM form above, we'll email you this contact info too.
If you're a state official and wish to update the reporting process for your state, fill out the form below.
Jonathan JK Stoltman, PhD: Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Frank Kearl, JD: Conceptualization, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Vinay Krishnan, JD: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing
Eli Vitulli, PhD: Writing – review & editing
Eileen Liu: Conceptualization, Data Curation
Isabella Liu: Data Curation, Writing – review & editing
Emma Austin, JD: Writing - review & editing
Isabel Tessier, JD: Writing - review & editing
Zach Lynch, MSW, MPH, MPA: Conceptualization, Data Curation
This work was completed in collaboration with Popular Democracy in Action.
Contributor roles follow CRediT guidelines.
We're sharing this information to facilitate transparency and accountability. We'd love for people to repost this information. We also know how long it took to compile (without funding) so we don't want it to show up places without credit. If you repost this work, please be good partners and follow our creative commons license and credit the source. If you have questions, let us know.
Are you a community member who wants to know more about spending? Check out this great resource guide!
Opioid Policy Institute by Jonathan JK Stoltman, PhD is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Opioid Policy Institute, LLC
