How the Billions from the Opioid Settlement Are Being Spent
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The Walter Smittle III Regional Responder Training Center sits at the end of a gravel road on a ridge just south of Ripley, West Virginia, in Jackson County. On a muggy morning this past August, I toured the building with Ross Mellinger, the county sheriff, a tall, bearded man with a tattoo of an elk on his right forearm. He showed me inside, where there’s a gym, an office, and two large classrooms, which host seminars for police officers and E.M.T.s. Lining the classroom walls are framed photos of arrests and drug busts, alongside mug shots and pictures of E.M.T.s at crash sites. “Our décor,” Mellinger called it. One photo showed deputies posing in front of stacks of confiscated cash. Outside one classroom was a photo of the last public hanging in West Virginia, which took place in Ripley, in 1897. The hanged man, John Morgan, had been jailed, tried for murder, and convicted, before escaping jail, getting apprehended, and being executed—all in ten days, Mellinger said. (It was closer to a month.) “Talk about efficient justice,” Mellinger added. “Now you can’t get a warrant in ten days.”
The training center, along with a nearby shooting range, was built in 2024. The shooting range was paid for with money the state had received from a series of settlements with companies involved in the manufacture and distribution of prescription opioids. These companies—including Johnson & Johnson, Walmart, CVS, Cardinal Health, and others—agreed to pay around fifty billion dollars to all fifty states, and the District of Columbia, starting in 2022 until the late twenty-thirties. West Virginia, vulnerable to the flood of pain pills in the late nineties and early two-thousands because of the state’s high rates of disability and poverty, has a higher rate of overdose deaths than any state in the country. It was promised a billion dollars, the most money per capita of any state. The first allotment given to Jackson County, in 2024, was just under six hundred thousand dollars. Mellinger petitioned the county commission to allocate about half of that money to the shooting range, and the commission unanimously agreed; later, it earmarked another two hundred thousand dollars for the training center.
Teresa Evans, who was born and raised in Jackson County, was a court reporter during West Virginia’s trial against opioid manufacturers. “I saw what terrible things were done by the opioid companies to manipulate and addict people,” she told me. Shortly after Jackson County decided to use its settlement money on the shooting range and the training center, she began questioning that decision at public meetings. Couldn’t the funds be better spent on rehab centers or recovery groups? “Do you see how lopsided this all seems?” she said at a meeting in the spring of 2024.
Evans was joined at some of those meetings by Kelly Boggess DeWees, whom she’d met at church more than a decade before. DeWees volunteered as an advocate for children whose parents had been accused of neglect or abuse. Her two children were both addicted to opioids; DeWees had been the primary caretaker for seven of her grandchildren, and legally adopted three of them. After navigating the morass of family law herself, she began guiding other would-be guardians. Evans admired her fervor, and the two women became fast friends. “We have the same heart,” DeWees said. But they have different styles. When I spoke to them about the commission’s spending decisions, Evans was diplomatic. “I just felt like the money had been so hard-fought to get that it should have gone for something opioid-related, not all law enforcement,” she said. DeWees quipped, “They’re just up there trying to shoot better so they can kill addicts.”
The shooting range, a square of recycled turf about half the size of a football field, with a concrete wall at one end, cost two hundred and seventy thousand dollars to build. Mellinger told me it’s used about a dozen times a year, and that the training center is used several times a month. As we walked around the place, he pitched me on the complex’s usefulness in the fight against opioid addiction. “If you get into a treatment facility here, it’s because you probably got arrested or you overdosed,” he said. “So we have to be more effective at doing our jobs before the treatment facilities ever get a crack at them.” In his view, “this was the best, most responsible investment that you could have with the available funds for the purpose of bettering the community. It’s a no-brainer.”
People often call money from the opioid settlement “blood money,” and you might expect that it would go mostly to the families of people who died of overdoses. But the payouts have been structured to treat states and communities as the harmed parties, with the idea that the opioid epidemic is a public-health crisis more than it is a collection of individual tragedies.
There’s a precedent for this: the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which was signed in 1998, similarly treated the damage done by cigarette campaigns as financial harm to states, which footed the Medicaid bills of smokers. In that settlement, tobacco companies agreed to pay states two hundred and six billion dollars, and that money came with almost no restrictions. None of it was earmarked for smokers or their families, and ultimately less than five per cent of it went to fund smoking prevention. To avoid a similar outcome, the opioid-settlement money was framed as a means to abate the “public nuisance” of the opioid epidemic; eighty-five per cent of the money must be spent directly on opioid remediation. An appendix to the settlement lays out approved uses for the money, including medication-assisted treatment, syringe-service programs, broad assistance for people in recovery programs, and education of law-enforcement officers “regarding appropriate practices and precautions when dealing with fentanyl or other drugs.” Anything not spent on such remediation must be reported publicly.
In West Virginia, the settlement funds are set to be released in portions across a period of eighteen years. Three-quarters of the money—eventually, seven hundred million dollars—will be given to a state-run nonprofit, the West Virginia First Foundation. (It has received three hundred and eighty million dollars so far.) The organization, which took more than a year and a half to be set up, plans to put the settlement in a fund to earn interest in perpetuity, so that the state doesn’t “commit intergenerational theft,” as the foundation’s director, Jonathan Board, told me. The foundation began spending the interest in February, 2025, two years after it started to come in, and disbursed eleven million dollars in that first year. In 2026, it has spent twenty million dollars, helping to fund youth and foster-care programs, a forty-eight bed “recovery village” in Berkeley County that provides comprehensive care for addicts, and a crisis-response unit, embedded in the police department, in the city of Wheeling.
Jonathan Stoltman, who runs the Opioid Policy Institute, a nonprofit watchdog, has been tracking the spending of opioid-settlement money across the country since the funds were first released, in 2022. “The money is generally moving too slow, and we’re actively in crisis,” he told me. In Michigan, where Stoltman lives, fifty per cent of the money is destined for local governments; a report released by the state’s attorney general earlier this year showed that, as of December 2025, eighty per cent of that money had not yet been spent. Billions of dollars have been disbursed nationwide, but it is “impossible” to track it all, according to Christine Minhee, who runs a national database, the Opioid Settlement Tracker. Minhee told me that public-reporting requirements vary state to state on the eighty-five per cent of the settlement that must be spent on opioid abatement. “The reporting that does exist can be amazing, but it’ll just be one piece of a fifty-state puzzle, and the rest of the pieces can be blurry,” Minhee said. Tracie M. Gardner, the executive director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network, noted that some municipalities have used settlement money to pay for existing programs and pulled the original funding to pay for non-opioid-related considerations—a process called supplantation. Supplantation is only explicitly restricted in some states, but, even where it is, enforcement can lag far behind spending decisions. “By the time we figure out the monitoring component, it will be done,” Gardner said.
But perhaps the most pressing problem, in Stoltman’s view, is that “there’s not enough guidance to help local decision-makers.” In 2023 and 2024, the city of Irvington, in New Jersey, spent more than six hundred thousand dollars of its settlement money on “opioid awareness” events that included large concerts. (The township has defended that decision.) More typically, municipalities have spent the money on law enforcement. In 2025, Amherst County, Virginia, approved spending seventy-five thousand dollars on police drones; Kane County, Illinois, earmarked more than a million dollars on a forensics lab. In May, Mississippi Today reported that the city of Gulfport had allocated two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of its settlement funds to police surveillance. That same month, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars were used in Trumbull County, Ohio, for new police vehicles. Many millions across the country have been spent covering jail costs.
In West Virginia, in 2024 and 2025, local governments spent nearly half of their allotment on general law-enforcement expenses. Patrick Morrisey, the governor, who led the state’s prosecution against opioid distributors and manufacturers as attorney general, has cited local governments’ “broad discretion” in their spending. The current attorney general, John McCuskey, recently announced that future opioid-related settlements will be distributed directly through the state legislature and local governments; those groups, McCuskey has said, “know best what their communities need.” In the past year, Cabell County spent four hundred thousand on hiring two new deputy sheriffs; Wood County spent a hundred and eighty thousand dollars on Tasers; Mason County spent a hundred and forty thousand on two police cruisers, fifty thousand on a new sheriff’s pickup, forty-four thousand on a virtual-reality firearms-training system, thirty thousand on Kevlar vests, and twenty thousand on “outfitting” for a Ford F-150. When I asked Board, the director of the West Virginia First Foundation, how to account for the divergence between his organization’s use of the funds and what these local governments were doing, he chalked it up to a “difference in interpretation.” Then he added, “You don’t tell another parent how to raise their kids.”
On the day that I toured the new training center in Ripley, I also attended a meeting at Teresa Evans and Kelly DeWees’s church. When I arrived, there were a handful of children running around outside; they brought me to the church basement, where DeWees had cooked a large meal—fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn casserole, green beans—enough to feed three dozen people. The kids went back out to play, and DeWees, who’s referred to as Mama Kelly by the parishioners, leaned close to me. “Those are all survivors,” she whispered.
The meeting was for Breath of Life, a Christian recovery group formed by DeWees’s daughter-in-law, who is ten years sober, and her son, who is also in recovery. The basement, about the size of the gym in the police department’s new training center, soon filled up as people got off work. On one wall were photos of people in addiction juxtaposed with photos of the same individuals in recovery. On another wall were the twelve steps—more specifically, “The 12 Steps Through JESUS,” as the poster read. “We admit that (by myself, without JESUS) we are powerless over our addiction.”
DeWees has gone to the county three times with requests for money from the opioid settlement, for meals and ad-hoc support for Breath of Life members. The county has approved each request, totalling seventy thousand dollars—“probably because we dug in before,” DeWees told me. She said that the group has started holding a weekly meeting in Sissonville, a town about half an hour south, and that, if more money comes in, she’ll start an informal day care for the children of people in recovery, and maybe, eventually, open a recovery home. “That’s our aspiration,” she told me. “But it’s—” she cut herself off and waved at the air, as if dismissing the possibility.
Donna Coleman, the director of the BoMar Club, a drop-in center for people struggling with mental illness in the middle of Ripley, told me that it’s hard for organizations like hers, which support people in active addiction, to secure funding. The BoMar Club, which is based in a two-story Victorian house, offers broad services for addicts: transportation, food, help with benefit and job applications. When I visited, people came in and out, grabbing something from the kitchen, saying hi to Coleman and her employees, asking to use the printer. Coleman, who recently reached ten years sober, previously got help from the BoMar Club herself. What works for one person might not work for another, she noted. “If God was being shoved down my throat when I came here, I’d be dead,” she said. The BoMar Club has received just under thirty thousand dollars from the opioid settlement, to fix its roof and bolster outreach efforts, and Coleman was petitioning the commission for more money to redo the floor, which sagged under our feet. “I have to have other ways of getting funding,” she told me. I mentioned my conversation with Mellinger, who told me that the public needs to be educated about the role the police play in recovery. Coleman said, “Do you know how he educated me? He put handcuffs on me.”
At the Breath of Life meeting, which lasted an hour, each attendee thanked God for their sobriety. There were readings and personal confessions and it ended with the Serenity Prayer. Afterward, DeWees took me aside. She asked me about the police training center; she hadn’t seen the inside yet. I described it to her, and she shook her head, slightly, and then more emphatically. “When I see some of this crazy stuff, I want to go in there and ask them for eighty-eight thousand dollars, because everybody else is just asking for whatever,” she said. As she spoke, she seemed to convince herself that she would go to the commission and ask for a “rainy-day fund” at the next meeting. Her voice, which had started soft, got louder, then it grew soft again. “Eventually that money is going to run out,” she said, “and then where are we going to be?” ♦