Portage County opioid settlement spending: Rehabilitation, counseling and drug testing
By Olivia Montgomery/Kent State NewsLab
Across the United States, nearly 105,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2023. Roughly 76% were due to opioid usage.
A settlement with Purdue Pharma, the company that created OxyContin, was reached in June. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced that Ohio was among 49 states that signed onto the $7.4 billion settlement.
That meant an additional $198 million for Ohio’s state and local governments and nonprofit organizations to help people recover from the opioid epidemic.
“As we get a few more years of experience and see how the results of these funds are allocated to these various resources, we can see the impact they’re having on the community and see if we need to revise and reallocate, or if everything’s going fine and we’re on the right track,” said Portage County Commissioner Jill Crawford.
How Portage County is spending settlement funds
Portage County programs received around $365,000 from settlement proceeds in 2023, $750,000 in 2024 and around $438,000 through Aug. 31, 2025, Crawford said.
Across the state, Ohio’s funds were directed to the OneOhio Recovery Foundation and county commissioners. The OneOhio Recovery Foundation is responsible for distributing 55% of the funds that the state receives in all of the settlements.
Of OneOhio Recovery Foundation grantees, 12 projects were focused in the region that includes Portage County. Some of these projects included: Ohio Recovery Housing, the Portage County Adult Probation Department, and Lake Area Recovery Center.
Of the other 45% of settlement funds, 15% goes to the state of Ohio and 30% goes to local governments for community recovery and the immediate needs of residents.
To spend local government funds in Portage County, the county commissioners consult with internal departments and county agencies to determine where to allocate funds, Crawford said.
“In 2023, there were approximately $130,000 of expenditures made,” Crawford said. “We have allocated to outside service providers, that’s $25,000 to rehabilitation services. Another $35,000 went to various counseling entities, and another $60,000 went to drug testing and helping people with getting those types of services.”
In 2024, $45.4 million was awarded to over 245 projects across the state of Ohio through the OneOhio Recovery Foundation, according to the OneOhio Recovery website.
For these grants, “Pretty much everyone in Ohio was eligible to apply, including nonprofits, for-profit organizations and government agencies,” said a representative from OneOhio Recovery in an email.
The state of Ohio funds are used for statewide prevention and treatment services.
How opioid settlement funds are being spent nationwide
According to the National Opioid Settlement website, the financial amount allocated to each state was decided by the amount of people who suffer from opioid use disorder in the state and the amount of opioids that have been shipped to the state.
Payments are going to be distributed over 18 years, according to the National Academy for State Policy. Similar to the overall financial allocation process, this distribution will be decided based on state population, amount of overdose deaths, the quantity of opioids delivered in each state, and the frequency of substance abuse disorder in the state.
More than $50 billion is being awarded to opioid recovery strategies, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy website.
This is a large sum of money that can be very hard to follow and track.
In 2019, Christine Minhee launched the Federal Opioid Settlement Tracker to help the public follow how much each state has received and what they are doing with the money.
“The site started in 2019 as a litigation tracking effort inspired by our failures of big tobacco,” said Minhee. “When I learned about big tobacco, I [thought], ‘Oh my God, so much money was misspent.’ Then I learned, ‘Oh wow, opioid litigation is happening, and we’re literally going to walk into the same situation.’”
The goal of the settlement tracker, Minhee said, was to act as a watchdog for how the money from these settlements was being spent.
“The overarching goal in the national kind of sense is kind of basic,” she said. “This time someone’s watching [how the money is being spent],” she said.
Once the resources are available, the information can be shared with the public in a digestible manner.
“I was trying to hand off resources to the journalists, then to the public at large, to run with,” she said.
Minhee also authored the site opioidsettlementguides.com. This site provides a state-by-state guide of how the money is allocated and required to be spent. Sites like these can help people better understand where these large sums of money are going.
Minhee plans to continue updating the site with more data regarding how the settlement money is being spent.
“It’s telling the story of the national picture of the data that I do have about what states are required to do when it comes to spending,” Minhee said. “The stuff that’s on my site now is just the tip of the iceberg, and the [other] stuff I have is the stuff that’s underneath.”
This story was originally published by the Kent State NewsLab, a collaborative news outlet publishing journalism by Kent State students.