Tens of billions of dollars are being paid to states from some of the country’s largest opioid distributing and manufacturing companies, the result of lawsuits that accused the companies of enabling a catastrophic overdose death crisis. Every state — usually the attorney general — decides who gets the money, how it’s allowed to be spent and whether the families most impacted by addiction can know or advise how the dollars are spent. 

When the first opioid settlements were being finalized in 2021, Mississippi’s main decision maker, Attorney General Lynn Fitch, asked the state’s towns, cities and counties to sign on to an agreement to join the lawsuits. The agreement says local governments receive 15% of Mississippi’s total share, and their elected officials can spend the money like any other public dollars without reporting where the dollars go. 

Nearly 150 Mississippi cities and counties signed onto the agreement, and most started receiving their payments in the fall of 2022. For the next two and a half years, they told their constituents almost nothing about how they were spending their money. 

Beginning in May, Mississippi Today put in records requests to all local governments receiving Mississippi opioid settlement money. One hundred and forty one of the 147 opioid governments that received opioid settlement funds told Mississippi Today how much money they’ve received and how they’ve been using the dollars. Five localities provided Mississippi Today with incomplete information, and Mound Bayou provided the newsroom with no information.

Cities and counties were scattered in the timing of their responses, from a few providing information the same day and others fulfilling requests months later. The presentation of their responses also took a variety of forms; some local record keepers provided detailed spending ledgers and official city or county meeting minutes where elected officials voted how to spend their dollars. Others replied to the email with a few sentences explaining how much money they received and how it’s being used. 

To clearly show how much money local governments have received and how they’ve been using those dollars, Mississippi Today created its database. We broadly identified five pieces of information from the responses: 

• How much money a government has received
• Whether a government’s settlement money is being used for a specific project and what that project is
• Where a government’s settlement money is being deposited into its general fund
• Where a government’s settlement money is unallocated or used for unknown purposes because the officials didn’t respond
• When the locality responded to our request.

To say whether the spending addressed addiction, Mississippi Today compared a government’s response to the list of opioid prevention uses the settlements’ lawyers recommend. 

From there, we sorted the governments into:

• Those that were using settlement money to address addiction
• Those that were not using settlement money to address addiction
• Those that used some settlement money to address addiction 
• Those that did not respond to our request for spending plans 
• Those that have yet to spend their dollars.

When a local government administrator provided official records that showed the money is being spent, Mississippi Today uploaded the documents and linked to the file in the database.

To make sure this information was presented accurately and consistently, Mississippi Today hired an independent fact checker to review the database. The fact checker was not paid based on the results of the assessment.