OurTupelo

WASHINGTON — An inspector general’s investigation into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to discuss sensitive military operations in Yemen with national security officials will likely be released soon, according to U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker. 

Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Mississippi Today in an interview that the inspector general’s report is complete. 

“I understand the report is complete, it’s under review and we should get it soon,” Wicker said.

The report looking into Hegseth’s messages and participation in the chat follows a joint letter from Wicker and U.S. Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, asking the Pentagon’s watchdog to investigate the Signal conversation.

Former national security adviser Mike Waltz set up the message in March to coordinate the Trump administration’s plans for strikes against the Houthis and accidentally invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to the chat. 

Signal is a free messaging app that allows users to communicate with strong end-to-end encryption to make conversations more secure. But security experts have warned that electronic devices using Signal could still be hacked by foreign adversaries. 

The chat between the Cabinet and national security officials described launch times of U.S. fighter jets, enemy targets, and munitions that would typically be classified as secret. 

The Department of Defense declined to comment for this story, but Hegseth has repeatedly said that he did not share classified information in the chat. 

Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.

I grew up in Calcutta, now Kolkata, a large city in India. Then, there were parts of Kolkata that smelled of raw sewage. When I came to the United States, I thought I had left that odor behind. And so I had — until I moved with my family to Jackson.

During the first 20-odd years we lived in Jackson, there was always somewhere in my neighborhood I could smell sewage. This indicated there was a leak, even though I couldn’t see it.

Sewage leaks are a health hazard. Contamination of drinking water with sewage can lead to a number of diseases. Further, the kind of mosquitoes that prefer to breed in sewage-contaminated water carry West Nile disease and encephalitis.

Unfixed sewage and water leaks can undermine nearby infrastructure, such as roads and buildings, thereby increasing the ultimate cost of repairs.

When the water and sewage systems were taken over by JXN Water in 2023, there were two sewage leaks near my house. JXN Water has repaired both of them.

For the first time since I moved to Jackson a quarter century ago, I have well-founded confidence that the quality of the water in Jackson is being adequately controlled, and the sewage disposed of properly. This is because these systems are being handled by JXN Water, which was created three years ago expressly to oversee repair and improvement of the city’s water infrastructure.

Less than a year after its creation, JXN Water also was given the job of repairing the failing sewer system, which over the previous three years had leaked 111 million gallons of untreated wastewater into the environment, and discharged 4.5 billion gallons of untreated or under-treated sewage into the Pearl River.

Since JXN Water took control there has been tremendous progress in providing reliable water to the city, and in ensuring that sewage does not leak onto city streets or elsewhere into the environment. However, this progress is now imperiled.

JXN Water is collecting insufficient money from Jackson’s ratepayers to meet operating expenses. JXN Water discovered this financial shortfall only earlier this year. This was not discovered earlier because until the end of 2024 JXN Water had not controlled the sewage and water systems for long enough to properly evaluate the cost of running them.

The federal government did give Jackson between $650 million and $800 million to fix its water woes, but most of this money came with strict conditions: it was to be used for repairing the water system and for projects that brought Jackson’s drinking water supply into compliance with federal standards. Funding the day-to-day operation of the water system was left as the responsibility of the municipality, as it is everywhere else in the country.

Using the federal funds for the sewage system was also excluded. Consequently, JXN Water has to rely on remittances from ratepayers to fund sewage system repairs and operating expenses for both systems.

JXN Water is making every effort to obtain payments for the water it delivers. When JXN Water took control of the water and sewage systems, many ratepayers’ meters were giving erroneous readings.

JXN Water replaced all the meters, but after sending out bills with readings from the new meters, thousands of customers did not submit remittances. After waiting months for payment, JXN Water pursued delinquent accounts and raised the proportion of collections to 70%.

Officials located and resolved over 1,000 unmetered connections and increased monthly revenue about 40%. Unfortunately, their projections indicate that even if they manage to raise collections to 100%, they will not be able to make up their financial shortfall. 

JXN Water is not a for-profit company: all the money it collects goes into running Jackson’s water and sewage systems. JXN Water has requested a rate increase corresponding to the amount that would be needed to fund its operations assuming an unrealistically high collection rate of 100%.

This increase was opposed by former Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the outgoing City Council and Jackson’s present Mayor John Horhn, none of whom have the final say on the rate increase. Most of these officials have declared the increase to be unaffordable for the city’s lower income residents.

The final decision on the rate increase rests with U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate, who oversees the repair of the water and sewer systems. He is considering other options such as legislative interventions and empaneling a Water Authority which could authorize a bond to cover JXN Water’s financial shortfall.

However, legislative measures take time, and a bond is a loan which will have to be repaid, presumably by rate increases borne by JXN Water’s customers. Issuing bonds for ongoing expenses is not a sustainable solution.

Jackson has the unsavory distinction of being the only city of its size in the entire country that does not cover its own water and sewer expenses.

For decades, city government has underinvested in these systems by obscuring the true costs of maintaining them. The present arrangement, which demands separating water and sewer expenses from the other finances of the city, makes the lack of financial support clear to the public.

While Judge Wingate works on options, JXN Water continues its work. It has been short of funds since July. It has resorted to not fully paying contractors who work to fix leaks or the engineering firm that runs the water plant, and promising them payment in the future.

Jackson is financing its water and sewage systems on the goodwill of companies with which it does business. It is unclear how long this goodwill will last.

The only sustainable solution proposed so far to funding Jackson’s water and sewer systems is a rate increase.

City government is abdicating its responsibility to provide safe drinking water for all its residents. It must find another mechanism to support those with low income.

Ranjan Batra retired after serving for 20 years on the faculty of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and continues to live in Jackson. He recently graduated from Jackson Water Academy, and is now a water ambassador.

Yellow buses pulled up to grassy curbs and carried students from the far reaches of Copiah County to school campuses in Crystal Springs and Wesson. For teachers, parents and students,  the first day of the fall semester was an ordinary August day in central Mississippi. Hot, humid and long. 

For administrators, it was the end of a probation that started over half of a century ago.

After 55 years, the Department of Justice lifted Copiah County School District’s desegregation order. The district had integrated to the agency’s satisfaction and can now forgo regular audits that check for inequity.

However, across the county, parents along a racial divide still see existing inequalities: better facilities and programs in mostly white Wesson and older buildings and few offerings in Crystal Springs, which is majority-Black.

Sixteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated schools were unconstitutional, Mississippi was compelled by a subsequent court decision to dismantle its dual school system beginning in 1970. Some districts like Copiah County faced specific desegregation orders based on their level of compliance.

“The goal was to ensure that school districts were meeting their obligations,” said Shaheena Simons, who up until April worked for the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. “That meant that the DOJ would ask questions and would review information and would sometimes go out on site and talk to people. The goal was to ensure that the school district was treating students fairly.”

In 1970, Copiah County School District joined over 200 others across the South under school  desegregation orders: 33 in Mississippi,  53 in Alabama, 49 in Georgia, 44 in Louisiana, 28 in South Carolina, 27 in North Carolina and 35 in Virginia. Now, 29 districts remain under that order in Mississippi, 30 in Georgia, 12 in Louisiana, and 39 in Alabama. The other Southern states have fewer than five districts remaining. 

More than 50 school districts were released from DOJ desegregation orders during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, more than during the two terms of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and the single term of George H.W. Bush. President Ronald Reagan released just under 150 school districts from orders, more than any other president.

In July, Copiah County School District Superintendent Rickey Clopton submitted paperwork through the board attorney after communication from the Department of Justice that the new administration intended to clear desegregation orders with a greater sense of urgency than past administrations. He didn’t expect to hear back so soon. The turnaround was a week.

“We’re just fortunate that someone in the Department of Justice has taken the initiative to try to settle some of these things and get us out of the past and move into the future,” Clopton told Mississippi Today.

The court order came down on the first day of school – and was news to longtime administrators and local activists. One central office employee found out from a press release, while an assistant superintendent got the news from a 20-second evening news clip. The local NAACP chapter president didn’t know until Mississippi Today informed him.

District officials hadn’t visited a courtroom, stood before a judge or escorted DOJ officials around Copiah County’s  four public schools in over a decade. Instead, assistant superintendents would traditionally go classroom to classroom to count students and staff by race and the school attorney would write up a report. Facilities and extracurricular offerings at each school were compared. So were yearbook spreads. The documents were slipped into an envelope and sent to a federal judge and emailed every March and October. 

The cycle would repeat until the court was pleased.

“ We were trying to justify what we were doing, but it had been very difficult for someone sitting in an office in Washington, D.C., to understand. It was the most frustrating part of the job that we totally understood and totally wanted to comply with but could not,” said Martha Traxler, longtime assistant superintendent with the district. She noted the challenges in particular of recruiting enough Black teachers.

Whether the school district made adequate progress was regular chatter in barber shops and on front porches for decades. Whether in a cafe in Crystal Springs or outside the Stop N Wash in Wesson or sipping on a tea on the patio of Stark’s Restaurant in Hazlehurst, you’re likely to hear a different story with characters depicted as negligent or stretched thin, malicious or doing the best they could with what they’ve got.

But in each telling of the county’s crawl towards progress, some details remain true, some statistics are irrefutable and some comparisons speak for themselves.

The county schools

Copiah County is mostly rural with lush farmland, three quaint towns and one county school district and a separate city school district in Hazlehurst. The county district has a K-12 school to the south in Wesson, which is 73.7 percent white with a student body over 78% white. It also has a high school, middle school and elementary school to the north in Crystal Springs, which is over 65% Black with a student body nearly 80% Black.

Wesson Attendance Center, established in 1960 with a new high school campus built in 1978, has all three schools on one expansive stretch of green bordered by trees. The campus boasts impressive facilities, including a separate baseball and softball field and  an indoor basketball court with maple floors.

Until 1978, Wesson students attended high school on the campus of Copiah-Lincoln Community College, whose football field Wesson students still practice and play on.

Crystal Springs High School, built in 1928, stands on the same few acres of land as Crystal Springs Elementary School. The campus has a football field with a track as well as a baseball field. The high school is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A past district administrator, two former teachers, one current teacher and three current students cited their concerns about aging and unclean facilities in interviews with Mississippi Today.

Crystal Springs Middle School is housed in the old Black high school, the William H. Holtzclaw School, which was built in 1958. Now, 67 years later, the campus remains seven  single-story brick buildings partly connected by breezeways and bordered by chain link. It’s apparent that the school was built as cheaply as possible, said former superintendent Dale Sullivan. The ceiling supports are a fraction of the size they should be. 

It’s also the worst performing school in the district. For the last four years, the school, which had a 2023-24 enrollment of 368 students, has received a “D” on the state accountability system. 

On average, while the district spends $179 more per pupil at Crystal Springs’ schools than Wesson’s, Crystal Springs teaches 383 more students.

August 1970

Jimmy Buchanan, who is Black, still remembers the day he became principal of Crystal Springs High School, one of the first integrated high schools in the county. He was recruited at age 28 from the Hotzclaw School for Black students.

“I just assumed that that’s just the way it was. Everything had always been separate that way and they just kept it like it was,” he told Mississippi Today.

School was set to open the following week when the desegregation order came down. Superintendent George Myers delayed school for a week. He called a reluctant Buchanan into his office and offered him the principal position at Crystal Springs. Buchanan was content at Hotzclaw and didn’t want the position but was told he had no choice  because there would be no Hotzclaw in a week’s time.

In the days leading up to the first day of school, he was up past midnight working on rearranging schedules for students. 

“It was different,” he said. “Because you had whites and Blacks that (had) never been together. And you had white teachers that never taught Black students.”

By the first day of school, enrollment at Crystal Springs High School was 66% Black, the middle school was 71% Black and the elementary school 81% Black. Many white families enrolled their children in Copiah Academy, which had recently expanded after merging with a segregation academy in Crystal Springs in April. Construction on a larger private school was underway.

Buchanan was undermined both by white parents who felt he was favoring Black students because of his race and by Black parents who felt he was favoring white students because of the racial make-up of the district office. They thought he was a token.

For the first semester at least, there were no assemblies. It took enough time and energy for district employees to manage new schedules and bus routes. Black and white students had to be equally represented in each class. Band and football were first reintroduced with an integrated roster.

“The idea was that the less contact these kids had with each other initially until they got used to doing what they were doing, the better. ‘Cause there was always some smart little kid that said something that he shouldn’t,” said Sullivan, who served as superintendent from 1973 to 2001.

The school board attorney went from school to school meeting with parents about “what’s fixing to happen.”

For the first few decades after the order, the district made do with a lot of “co-’s” – a white student body president and a Black student body president, a white homecoming queen and a Black homecoming queen. Even for superlatives like ‘best dressed” and “most likely to succeed” there was Black and white representation.

It was implemented not because of friction but because of what might happen should tensions arise, said Sullivan.

“I would say integration was as smooth as it could have been,” Buchanan said. “It got as integrated as you’re going to get. … At least here.”

Sullivan remembers how some white families were committing fraud to be zoned into Wesson schools, which remained primarily white, because of “housing patterns.” They would move campers to land owned by friends and family in Wesson in time for school registration.

Greg Brock, who was a high school senior then and wrote columns for the local paper, remembers no fights on campus but plenty of tantrums in town. His dad’s auto body shop was boycotted by locals who disapproved of his columns urging people to accept change. He remembers a racist rant from a customer.

In a column at the time for the city newspaper, he wrote “How is school? … What has happened? … How do we like the teacher? … Will it work? These questions and many more permeate the minds of interested persons as the school year of 1970-71 progresses.”

August 2005

In August 2005, the county schools were declared integrated except for staff and teacher assignments. The court order came down during another weeklong school delay with this one brought by Hurricane Katrina.

The storm knocked out power for many residents in Copiah County and destroyed homes. Some students enrolled in schools in neighboring states.

When school resumed, “I don’t think the numbers changed as much as it was more or less accepted among the races that: ‘Hey, Black teachers are not as bad as we thought. They can teach. They’re really knowledgeable. Hey, white teachers, they do care. And they are human beings, too,’” Buchanan said. 

The challenge for assistant superintendent Traxler who took on the role of assistant superintendent in 2003 was to find enough Black teachers for predominantly white Wesson. The court order demanded that the ratio of Black and white students in each school reflect the ratio of Black and white teachers at the school.

Traxler traveled to job fairs, visited local high schools and colleges, set up booths at conventions and approved faculty transfers – but the percentages didn’t seem to budge. 

Until her retirement in 2016, Traxler experienced a worsening teacher shortage, which made the job of satisfying the DOJ orders more difficult. She struggled to find more than a single qualified math and science teacher at conventions in her later years on the job. 

“It was impossible what they asked of us. Even if we transferred teachers over. They mostly didn’t want to commute further. They would’ve chosen another district,” Traxler said.

In the district’s most recent status report for the Department of Justice and the courts, percentages of white and Black teachers at the four schools remained stagnant. District officials were seeing no change. The percentage of Black teachers at Wesson’s schools hovered around 10%.

“The only thing we had left is to balance out the professional staff of our schools without transferring them out from all sides of the county,” said Superintendent Clopton. “It was unrealistic because of the patterns of where people lived and patterns of where people want to work.”

September 2025: Crystal Springs

Crystal Springs High School junior Marissa Marsaw remembers the first time she played Wesson High School in volleyball. She slung her duffel bag on a spare chair and marvelled at the locker room for guest teams. It had clean floors without rat poop and roaches, an entire working restroom, and new-looking lockers. 

She couldn’t believe she was in the same school district. 

Only 22 miles down Highway 51 from her native Crystal Springs, she encountered a very different city and school. A school where students could partake in a robotics team and a Beta club. She had grown accustomed to fundraising for the athletic teams to cover fees and equipment. Wesson had its own stadium.

Marissa Marsaw said  it disturbed her and her mother to learn that Wesson and Crystal Springs hold high school graduations on the same day – and that board members, split along lines of race and geography, didn’t attend the others.

Three current Crystal Springs students expressed concerns about dirty locker rooms and a lack of class trips and extracurriculars like robotics. 

“The district gives to who they want to give to,” Crystal Springs senior Alivia Newell said. “I don’t think they want us to be a better school.”

They acknowledge community members are more comfortable voicing concerns online but not in person. It doesn’t help that the Copiah County School District holds board meetings at 3 p.m. on a weekday when most parents and teachers are still at work and students are just getting out of class.

Marsaw and her friends gather at Book Street Cafe in downtown Crystal Springs some days after school. They interact with classmates from not just the local high school.

Greg Brock, the proprietor and a former New York Times and Washington Post editor, bought the cafe last year after moving home. He had gotten his start as a student journalist at the city paper and covered integration and its aftermath.

Mid-to-late afternoon on a weekday, his cafe boasts a lively clientele that pretty much represents the diversity of the city. Teens pull books from the shelves and sip on colorful refreshments and frappes.

It’s meaningful for Brock who believes the death of the city came with white flight.

“They wrote that school off,” he said of the Crystal Springs schools. “That’s the day this town started dying. When whites started abandoning it.”

September 2025: Wesson

Across the county, in Wesson, locals had been congregating at Wash N Stop for years. From the outside, it resembles an ordinary gas station convenience store with a regular crowd of commuters and townies. It’s the most active parking lot in town.

To many in Wesson, Larry Ashley is best known as the proprietor of the convenience store that serves mouth-watering fried chicken and potato wedges. Ashley also builds homes with the help of his son.

Ashley, who has lived in Wesson most of his life, switched to Hazlehurst City School District from Wesson his junior year but was recruited to join Copiah Academy’s football team his senior year. He went on to attend Copiah-Lincoln Community College and graduate from Mississippi State University. 

“I think Crystal Springs has all the same things that Wesson has school-wise,” Ashley said. “But they’re starting a hundred-yard dash with 10 kids that have to run an extra 10 yards to get to the finish line. So what does a teacher have to do? A teacher has to lower her standards.”

For mom Barbie Stroud,who is white and new to Wesson, the decision to home school while her family lived in Crystal Springs was easy.

“The schools are just not the same,” she said.

She feared school fights that she heard about in Crystal Springs and Hazlehurst would endanger her child’s wellbeing. She didn’t want her child around purported gangs in those communities.

At Crystal Springs High School, nearly 44% of the student population was suspended in 2023-2024 with 45 violent incidents reported. Less than 10% of Wesson Attendance Center students were suspended the same year with 12 violent incidents.

One has double the chance of becoming a victim of violent crime in Crystal Springs than in Wesson, though a majority of crimes reported are property crimes.

Wesson is a town where, in the words of one resident, “the most common crime is speeding tickets and residents keep each other accountable on Facebook.” Public school teaching posts are hardly vacant because a majority of teachers are from the community.

“I wouldn’t drop my kid by himself at a football game there on a Friday night,” Stroud said of Crystal Springs.

Crystal Springs has  some extracurriculars that Stroud wants for her child, such as JROTC and more vocational classes.

Blake Allen, a Wesson graduate and musician, said the problem is that the accountability system used by Mississippi public schools incentivizes teachers to raise the bottom 25 more than work with the middle 50 or top 25. He feels his kid wouldn’t get the same attention in a Crystal Springs classroom where many more students are starting off with less knowledge.

He also said Wesson’s facilities seem nicer.

“There’s probably more favoritism towards Wesson,” Allen acknowledged.

A ‘cultural difference’

When asked whether the schools in Crystal Springs and Wesson are similar in quality, Copiah County residents and stakeholders held up statistics, rattled off anecdotes and shared photos of leaking roofs. 

Among Crystal Springs students, 34% on average enroll in college and 31% take an advanced placement course in high school. Among Wesson students, 77.6% enroll in college and 63% take an advanced placement course.

Wesson is an “A” school. Crystal Springs High School is a “B” school.

Kenneth Thrasher, who is Black, remembers a tense conversation with administrators in the central office about a transfer for his high-achieving daughter from Wesson to Hazlehurst School District. They wanted him to keep her there. 

But he felt a “cultural difference” at Wesson. He was getting messages from a teacher he felt didn’t have experience teaching enough Black students. The teacher scrutinized his daughter’s knack for dancing when popular music was played in class. He also didn’t like that she was a minority in the classroom.

The decision to enroll her in Hazlehurst wasn’t hard. 

“I had seen the last Confederate flag fly in the line-up at parent pick-up,” he told Mississippi Today.

Asked whether the Copiah County School District successfully integrated to the extent there isn’t a noticeable Black school and white school, a majority of the more than a dozen local residents surveyed by Mississippi Today said no.

Crystal Springs has the Black schools in the district and Wesson the white ones, they said.

“We are all prejudiced,” Ashley said. “Because if I walk into a football game, you got families, mama, daddy, Black, white, Mexican, whatever, sitting in the middle section. And in another section you’ve got Black looking thugs, dreadlocks, all this stuff. I ain’t saying they’re bad people. You got white tattooed out all over their faces and all this thug looking white guys over here. And I’ve got my 9- and 10-year-old daughter with me. Where am I going to sit? I’m going to choose the family section in the middle. Is that prejudice? Maybe so, but I’m still going to choose it.”

Mississippi Today also asked stakeholders whether moving a certain percentage of Black teachers to Wesson changed the dynamic in the county between the races and community schools.

A majority of school officials said it would be hard to say.

“A part of me felt that I didn’t achieve the goal that I set out to achieve, which was to get everyone to love our school as much as I did,” said former assistant superintendent Traxler. “I’d like to say I can’t change hearts. Only God can do that.”

Correction 9/16/25: This story has been corrrected to change the name of the school Kenneth Thrasher’s daughter transferred to.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to sharply curtail the federal Voting Rights Act by limiting who can sue to enforce protection against racial discrimination at the ballot box. 

The Mississippi appeal could have significant repercussions nationwide and for the federal law that stems from the Civil Rights era. If the nation’s highest court rules in Fitch’s favor, it would mean civil rights groups could no longer bring a suit on behalf of citizens.

“This direct appeal presents an important legal question that has divided the courts of appeals: whether private parties may sue to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Fitch’s office writes. “The answer is no.” 

The AG’s office declined to comment on why it filed the appeal, which stems from a lawsuit brought by the Mississippi branch of the NAACP over the state’s legislative districts. The litigation resulted in a federal three-judge panel ruling last year that Mississippi’s legislative districts diluted Black-voting strength in three areas of the state.    

The panel, comprised of all George W. Bush-appointed judges, ordered lawmakers to redraw its districts to give Black voters in three areas of the state a fairer shot at electing candidates of their choice. Special elections for these races are currently ongoing, with the general election scheduled to happen in November. 

Ari Savitzky is a senior attorney with the ACLU voting rights project, and he is one of the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. He told Mississippi Today that the plaintiffs will oppose the state’s request. 

“What the Mississippi defendants and the GOP are asking is to overturn 60 years of law and history,” Savitzky said. 

The appeal procedure for redistricting cases is different from normal lawsuits. A member of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sat on the initial three-judge panel, so the state’s appeal will not go to the appellate circuit court. 

Instead, the appeal goes directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it must address it in some capacity. The court can ask for additional briefings, oral argument or summarily dismiss it outright. 

If the court does rule in Mississippi’s favor, it would mean only the Department of Justice, under the control of a presidential administration, could sue to enforce the Voting Rights Act. 

Mississippi’s appeal follows a similar case pending before the court. 

Several appellate circuits, including the 5th Circuit, have ruled that private citizens do have a right to sue under the federal act. But the 8th Circuit in 2023 and 2025 said that only the government, not voters and other private parties, can sue to enforce the provision, meaning circuits have been split on the issue.

The Supreme Court paused the 8th Circuit’s ruling in July, but it may agree to hear an appeal in the coming months since three members of the court — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — dissented.

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, Mississippi’s lone Democrat in Washington and someone who has used the courts to enforce civil rights laws, decried the state’s attempt to gut part of the federal law. 

“I’ve been elected all of my adult life, and in every instance, it was through legislation in the Voting Rights Act that created that opportunity,” Thompson told Mississippi Today. “To now try to deny citizens their day in court is the complete opposite of the intent of the Voting Rights Act.”

Delta State University is investigating the death of a student who was found hanging from a tree on the Cleveland campus early Monday.

The student was a 21-year-old Black man from Grenada, Mississippi. Delta State released his name, but Mississippi Today is choosing not to do so pending the results of the investigation.

Col. Michael L. Peeler, director of public safety and police chief at Delta State, said his department was notified a body was found hanging from a tree in the central part of the campus at 7:05 a.m.

While he said there was no evidence of foul play, he asked the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the Bolivar County Sheriff’s Department and the Cleveland Police Department to assist in the investigation.

Several scheduled events on campus were canceled.

“Wait here while I check your information. Everything will be alright.” 

That’s what Mario Reyes Rodas’ attorney said the federal immigration officer told his client the morning of Aug. 27 during a traffic stop along Interstate 20 in Rankin County. The Morton resident provided a current driver’s license and work authorization card that has allowed him to work as a landscaper while he sought permanent residence. 

Then came the questions. 

Where are you from? Mexico, Reyes Rodas answered. Do you have a visa or authorization to be in the country? No, the man replied, though he had been trying to obtain permanent residency for years. 

That was enough information for him to be detained, even though he has no criminal record. 

Reyes Rodas left his car on the side of the road as he was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He was taken to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Pearl to be processed and then to the Madison County Detention Center. Within a week, he was taken to River Correctional Center, an ICE facility in Ferriday, Louisiana.

“He hasn’t seen freedom since then,” said Jeremy Litton, who is representing Reyes Rodas in an ongoing immigration case. 

Reyes Rodas was charged with the civil violation of entry into the country without authorization, his attorney said. 

The 40-year-old father of two was not given a reason for his detainment, his attorney said, nor was there documentation of a warrant to arrest or detain him. 

Litton said his client also was not stopped that day under suspicion of violating a state law, such as speeding. 

Why, then, Litton wondered, was Reyes Rodas detained. A week and a half later came a potential answer. 

On Sept. 8, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal immigration officers can stop people without reasonable suspicion based on their apparent race or ethnicity, if they speak in Spanish or accented English, if they are in a place where undocumented immigrants are known to gather and if they work in specific jobs that undocumented people are known to work. 

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the Sept. 8 majority order that multiple considerations taken together “can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.” 

In her dissent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor argued the Trump administration has declared all Latinos regardless of U.S. citizenship who fit those criteria “are fair game to be seized at any time.” 

Reyes Rodas isn’t the only person detained who doesn’t have a criminal background. 

As of September, 70% of all people held in immigration detention centers around the country have no criminal convictions, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse immigration data by Syracuse University. Of those with criminal convictions, many committed minor offenses such as traffic violations. 

A spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection confirmed the detention of Reyes Rodas and that he was turned over to Immigration and Custom Enforcement for removal processing. An ICE spokesperson was not immediately available for comment. 

Federal immigration agents have conducted immigration enforcement along I-20, including in March and May that resulted in at least 70 arrests and seizure of firearms and ammunition.  

Emmanuel Reyes, the eldest American-born son of Reyes Rodas, remembers finishing work on Aug. 27 when his girlfriend called. 

Don’t worry, she told him, but immigration officers picked up your father. Reyes said the news immediately sent him into a panic. 

Reyes said his father is a loving man of faith who has supported him and his 17-year-old brother, coming to every game, meet and match for the multi-sport athletes. 

His parents came to America 20 years ago to provide support for their family members in Mexico, and they stayed to give their sons a better life. Reyes said he and his brother have grown up aware of their U.S. citizenship and looked for ways to help their parents, including how to help them gain legal status. 

“My dad was trying to live for what he came here for, the American dream,” Reyes said. “ … They wanted to give us opportunities. It’s better here.”

Litton has represented Reyes Rodas since 2019, not long after he was one of more than 600 mostly Latino workers detained in raids at chicken processing plants in central Mississippi. 

That year, he filed an application requesting the cancellation of removal proceedings against Reyes Rodas, which is a defense available to those facing deportation who meet certain requirements, including a clean criminal record, continuous presence in the country for at least 10 years and potential hardship to his U.S. citizenship children if he were deported. 

Litton said the 42B application is a pathway to a green card: permanent residency that allows people to live and work in the United States.   

As they waited for the application to be processed, Litton said Reyes Rodas applied and received authorization to work, which is valid through 2029. That document enabled him to get a Mississippi driver’s license.  

It took several years for Reyes Rodas to be issued notice to appear in immigration court to be able to file the 42B application. His first court date scheduled in 2021 was delayed several times, Litton said. 

By 2023 as they prepared for the hearing, Litton looked up the case and found it was gone, which he said is something that has happened in a handful of other cases relating to the poultry raids. 

Reyes Rodas had a court date scheduled for Tuesday with the LaSalle Immigration Court in Jena, Louisiana. But like his earlier case, the date disappeared off the court calendar, Litton said he learned Friday afternoon. 

As a result, Litton plans to request a bond hearing to argue that Reyes Rodas had valid work authorization and a pending immigration application when he was detained and mention the administrative challenges with his case.  

However, Reyes Rodas may not be able to receive it in light of a recent Board of Immigration Appeals decision stating that immigration judges lack the authority to approve or hear bond requests for those already in the country without authorization. 

Litton said it’s “indefinite detention” for anyone, regardless of when they entered the country. 

This story is part one of our series, The Black Box: Inside Mississippi’s opioid settlement spending. Explore the series.

Mississippi has received tens of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlement money each year since 2022 from corporations that contributed to the opioid overdose epidemic, a public health crisis that’s killed roughly 10,000 people in the state since 1999.

But a Mississippi Today investigation found that in the three years of receiving the funds, public officials across the state reported spending less than $1 million – or less than 1% of the money received so far – on direct measures to prevent more drug deaths.

The attorney general’s office split the money – expected to total around $421 million through 2040 – between Mississippi’s state and local governments. Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office and the Legislature oversee most of Mississippi’s opioid settlement dollars, but they’ve only spent money on attorneys’ fees so far. The remaining portion – 15% of Mississippi’s funds – goes to cities, counties and towns.

Management of the local dollars has mostly been a mystery until now. Fitch created a contract with towns, cities and counties that allows them to spend their portion on whatever they see fit – unlike agreements in at least 34 other states. They’re also not required to report what they do with the dollars.

But how Mississippi governments spend money is information that can be requested by anyone. From May to August, Mississippi Today filed public records requests with all 147 towns, cities and counties that have received settlement dollars to find out how much they’ve gotten and how they’ve been using the funds.

The newsroom accounted for about $15.5 million and received responses from almost every city and county receiving settlement shares. It filed an ethics complaint against Mound Bayou, the only local government that didn’t provide any information. Mississippi Today tracked how that money is being spent and analyzed the data to determine how much Mississippi is spending to prevent overdoses, treat addiction and connect people with recovery.

Mississippi Today has published a database for anyone to search how local governments are spending opioid settlement dollars.

Here are some of the biggest takeaways:

• Since September 2022, the 146 towns, cities and counties that responded to Mississippi Today reported receiving roughly $15.5 million. Leaders for those governments have spent about $6.4 million of that.

• Around $945,000 has been used to address addiction with the strategies laid out in one of the opioid settlements, which plaintiffs’ lawyers called “an exemplar.” Most of that money has been used to support drug courts and mental health crisis intervention services. All of the states bordering Mississippi report using at least $4 million each – significantly more than Mississippi both in terms of dollars and percentage of total share – on strategies to address the overdose crisis, and most have committed tens of millions of dollars already.

• The remaining $5.4 million is being used for other purposes. Local officials have deposited $4.2 million directly into accounts for general expenses, often making it impossible to track the dollars. Some expenses not related to addiction include police equipment in Oxford and fiber optic cable installation in Jackson. The city of Vicksburg purchased and firefighter suits and donated to a crisis pregnancy center.

• Over the past three years, 20 of the 147 local governments have spent or finalized plans to spend some or all of their opioid settlement shares to address addiction, officials told Mississippi Today, and 53 governments have not spent or made plans to spend any opioid dollars.

• Just one of the 147 governments, Hattiesburg, indicated it would create opportunities for public input on how to spend its opioid settlement dollars. Mayor Toby Barker initiated his plan after Mississippi Today submitted its public records request in May. 

Public health and legal experts who reviewed Mississippi Today’s data said the pattern of Mississippi’s local spending is a problem, as the money was won from companies that profited while residents struggled with addiction.

Representatives for the towns, cities and counties pointed out to Mississippi Today that Fitch’s contract advised them to spend their dollars for any public purpose. The attorney general has minimized the amount of Mississippi opioid settlement money that must be spent addressing addiction. 

While most states have developed plans that say all opioid settlement money needs to go toward addressing addiction, the Mississippi attorney general’s version says the state can use 30% of its dollars on other purposes, the most allowed by the national lawsuit settlements. Fitch included all of the local dollars in that 30%.

In addition to the attorney general’s directive, some city and county officials said the small amounts they were receiving made it difficult to identify the right addiction-related project. They instead highlighted other efforts they have undertaken to address substance use disorder, like funding local drug courts with other public dollars.

Mississippi Today emailed Fitch a letter with these findings, and she did not answer whether she still believes it was the right decision to allow cities and counties such free rein. Her chief of staff, Michelle Williams, said in a statement that the opioid crisis has cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars, and the settlements allow state and local governments to pay for prior opioid expenses over the past three decades. 

She said the attorney general’s office is working with the Legislature and a new state opioid settlement advisory committee to use the majority of Mississippi’s settlement dollars to prevent more overdoses.

“The Attorney General’s Office is committed to doing everything we can to get the money out to where it is needed quickly,” Williams wrote. 

But the state’s share likely won’t be distributed until July 2026, after the Legislature passes its next budget. Until then, the local dollars are the only Mississippi opioid settlement funds expected to be spent on anything besides lawyers’ fees and administrative expenses. 

Dr. Rahul Gupta, former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and an expert witness in several of the lawsuits against opioid companies, said these dollars should be an opportunity to prevent more suffering after the defendant companies’ business models led to an unprecedented number of drug deaths.

He said Mississippi’s local spending reminded him of how states used money from the 1990s tobacco lawsuits — for purposes other than ending a public health catastrophe.

“We should have learned a lot from our tobacco settlement funds,” Gupta said. “It’s disheartening and disappointing to see that.”

‘There was just nothing’

In 2022, when Tricia Christensen established the Appalachian Opioid Remediation project, she created a database to track how 13 states in the region spent their opioid settlement dollars. For the next two years, she led a team that pored through Google alerts, media reports and local public meetings in those states, including Mississippi.

She and her team found opioid settlement spending information in every state, except one.

“In Mississippi, there was just nothing,” said Christensen, now a consultant who advises states on how to spend opioid settlement money. “It was like a black box.”

While a few local governments provided Mississippi Today with spending resolutions passed by city and county officials, most appear to be spending their dollars without any public announcement. Many officials didn’t produce any internal documents that detailed how they were using their money and instead emailed the newsroom a few sentences that outlined their expenses.

Officials with McComb and Charleston said they didn’t know how much opioid settlement money they’d received – despite the fact they were already spending it. Mississippi Today referred clerks for the cities to the management firm in charge of distributing national opioid settlement money so they could determine how much their governments had secured.

When they provided the newsroom with that information and their spending, the records showed each had already spent a large amount of their dollars. McComb used $106,500 of its roughly $151,000 for new police cars, and Charleston had used the roughly $1,000 it received for payroll expenses and police supplies.

Dr. Judith Feinberg, a West Virginia University behavioral medicine and psychiatry professor, helped write a set of best practice guidelines for how states can use these dollars to prevent more overdose deaths. She said she believes state officials who don’t require or even encourage public reporting of opioid settlement spending are prioritizing politics over public health.

“If no one writes anything down, then there’s nothing to investigate,” she said.

Not every government provided Mississippi Today with all the requested information. Officials for Rankin County, which is expected to get the third largest amount of opioid settlement money of any local government, provided Mississippi Today with checks they’ve received but no documents that detail how they’ve been spending nearly $510,000. 

In county attorney Craig Slay’s response, he included a copy of Fitch’s contract with local governments. The sentence that says counties can spend opioid dollars on anything they deem appropriate was highlighted.

Slay did not respond to calls and emails from Mississippi Today about the spending, and he didn’t engage with a reporter for the newsroom at a Rankin County Board of Supervisors meeting in August when he was asked how these dollars were spent. 

“The fact that no one has to report is tragic because you don’t know what the money was spent for,” Feinberg said. “And there’s no accounting. That’s really crazy.”

Thinking about the larger picture

Mississippi’s local governments are expected to accept at least $48 million more in opioid settlement funds over the next 15 years.  

Dr. Cathy Slemp led the West Virginia health department as the state battled the country’s deadliest overdose crisis in the late 2010s. She said the unspent dollars could be an opportunity for local elected officials to begin developing the treatment and recovery resources needed to stop more Mississippi drug deaths.

It’s easy to understand why local governments might want to use the funds to plug budget holes, she said. But she cautioned whether that would be the wisest decision, as many Mississippians struggling with opioid addiction still don’t have access to effective treatment. 

“We can continue to just fill holes, or we can think about it in the larger picture,” she said.

Melody Worsham, a peer support specialist for the Mississippi Recovery Advocacy Project, said she’s hopeful this money can eventually find its ways to groups like hers — organizations that rely on the expertise of those who’ve dealt with addiction and can share which strategies may reach others in similar situations.

But she said the management of the opioid settlement funds mirrors a concerning pattern of how officials in Mississippi spend public dollars. 

“When they get the money, the state figures out, the governments figure out how to spend that money as quietly as possible.”

Editor’s note: Mississippi Today sent almost all of its public records requests in mid-June. Local governments responded on dates that ranged from the same day we sent the request to early September. The settlement administrators sent some payments out throughout July, and governments that wrote back to the newsroom in June have likely received more money since then. We’ve noted the date of when we received the information in our database. Additionally, some towns, cities and counties may have used money or formalized spending plans since they responded. 

When governments provided totals with and without interest, Mississippi Today used the total without interest, as more governments responded in that format. Some checks originally earmarked for towns and cities, especially those set to receive relatively little opioid settlement money, were reallocated to their counties. Because of that, the total these governments expect to get may differ slightly from what they will get. 

Mississippi Today special projects intern Maeve Rigney contributed to the data collection for this story. Andrea López Cruzado contributed to the data analysis.

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. 

This story is part two of our series, The Black Box: Inside Mississippi’s opioid settlement spending. Explore the series.

For the past three years, 147 towns, cities and counties have controlled millions of Mississippi opioid settlement dollars meant to address the overdose epidemic. 

However, elected officials have been much more likely to spend the money on routine government expenses than on addressing addiction, a Mississippi Today investigation found. And they are doing so legally: Attorney General Lynn Fitch allowed them to spend these dollars on any public purpose rather than addressing the public health catastrophe that’s killed over 1,300 Mississippians since the state received its first lawsuit check.

Mississippi Today filed public records requests with all cities and counties that have received National Opioid Settlement dollars to learn how much money each has received and spent. Of the over $15.5 million local governments have received, they’ve used roughly $6.4 million as of this summer. About $4.3 million of that has been designated for routine government expenses. 

Most of Mississippi’s opioid settlement money is controlled by the state Legislature, which tasked an advisory committee with recommending how lawmakers spend the state’s share to treat and prevent opioid addiction. But applications for those dollars only went out last month, and that money is unlikely to be distributed until the Legislature enacts a budget in July 2026. 

Until then, the only Mississippi lawsuit money that can likely address addiction is funds that went to the 147 local governments, which are expected to net around $48 million more in settlements over the next 15 years.  

Melody Worsham, a peer support specialist for the Mississippi Recovery Advocacy Project, has worked to address the harms of the addiction epidemic for over a decade. She said she sees missing resources in the state’s effort to prevent overdose deaths every day, and she hopes the settlement money will eventually go to groups such as hers that build on the knowledge of people who’ve experienced addiction. 

She said that she would be willing to fill potholes herself after Mississippi Today told her the amount of local government opioid lawsuit money being used for city and county general expenses.

“I’ve got people to volunteer to do the potholes if they stop spending the opioid money for that,” she said. “I’m disgusted. I’m disillusioned. I’m actually kind of speechless, I really am.”

Jackson County on the Gulf Coast and the city of Jackson are two of the five local governments that have received the most money in the state to date. Neither are using their dollars to address addiction, records responses show.

Jackson County, the county with the most suspected overdose deaths last year, is using over $1 million for unspecified government expenses. The city of Jackson has spent some of the roughly $547,000 it reported receiving for fiber optic cable installation, office moving expenses and a shelving system. 

Both Jackson County Board of Supervisors President Barry Cumbest and Jackson Mayor John Horhn did not respond to emails asking whether their governments have made the best use of these lawsuit dollars. Records show Horhn took office after the city of Jackson spent some of its settlement money for general purposes.

Mississippi Today could only account for about $945,000 across all 147 localities that has been spent to address and prevent addiction. Most of that went to fund mental health emergency services and drug intervention courts, programs that direct some people struggling with substance use disorder away from jails or prisons and toward treatment programs. 

Officials for the dozens of governments depositing opioid settlement checks into general expense accounts told Mississippi Today that once the money goes into those accounts, it’s impossible to trace where the dollars go. Many of them pointed to a settlement agreement and letters authored by Fitch’s office, which told local governments to use the money however they see fit.

Across the country, there’ve been other instances of local governments spending opioid lawsuit dollars for resources that may not directly address addiction. But unlike Mississippi’s contract, most states’ agreements make elected officials conform to an approved list of uses that are intended to respond to the public health crisis. 

Dr. Judith Feinberg, a West Virginia University behavioral medicine and psychiatry professor, co-authored a guide with other public health professors that lays out how states can use opioid settlement money to prevent more deadly overdoses. After reviewing Mississippi Today’s data, she said the local governments’ spending so far has been “very tragic.”

“From a public health perspective, this is complete and utter bullshit,” she said. 

After Mississippi Today sent Fitch a letter that outlined the local governments’ spending, she did not answer a question about whether she still stood by the decision to allow cities and counties to spend the money on any public purpose.

In a statement, Fitch’s Chief of Staff Michelle Williams said the opioid crisis cost hundreds of billions of dollars, expenses that affected government health care, criminal justice and social safety net services. Williams said the settlements can be used to reimburse cities and counties for some of these costs. 

It’s a different message than Fitch communicated when announcing at least one of the settlements in 2021. When an agreement was finalized with the consulting group McKinsey, her office said the funds were being provided “to address the crisis.”

In a July interview, Williams said that the attorney general’s agreement was the best way to encourage Mississippi’s towns, cities and counties to join the national opioid lawsuits. 

But she said she couldn’t recall if any local governments said they wouldn’t sign on to the lawsuits unless they could spend their money on any purpose, though she believed it helped get more to join. 

Fitch is reported to be considering a run for governor in 2026, which Feinberg said could have played into her decision. 

“It’s just politically to make everyone happy at the local level,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, here’s a little slush fund for you. Do what you would like.’”

Pine Belt resident Jane Clair Tyner watched her son Asa Henderson struggle with opioid use until he died at 23 years old in 2019. When Mississippi Today told her about the settlement spending of the cities and counties, she said it adds heartache to the grief she continues to carry. 

Tyner said she has no interest in receiving settlement checks from the pharmaceutical companies, as the money would be better used to prevent more overdoses. But the spending shows that Fitch’s new message is the one cities and counties have taken to heart. 

“It’s just incredibly unjust,” she said. “It makes a mockery of our entire justice system. It makes a mockery of court cases. It makes a mockery of settlements.” 

‘The epidemic is marching on’

While U.S. and Mississippi overdose deaths have slightly decreased over the past two years, both the state and national death rates are higher than they were in the late 2010s, when the country’s surgeon general said combating the opioid epidemic was his top public health priority.

Dr. Caleb Alexander, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health professor and an expert witness in many of the opioid settlement lawsuits, said all the money Mississippi is receiving is a valuable resource that can prevent more deaths. 

“The epidemic is marching on, and enormous harms continue to occur in cities and counties, big and small,” he said. 

Shortages in the state’s treatment and recovery resources, ones that more local financial support could help address, have likely prolonged the epidemic. A 2023 Journal of the American Medical Association study found that among Mississippians on Medicaid, a federal-state health insurance program for vulnerable people, less than a third of those diagnosed with opioid addiction received effective medication for the disease. 

Sixty-eight of Mississippi’s 82 counties didn’t have any recovery residences, also known as sober living homes, according to a 2022 report from the Public Health Institute. The report says the availability of these homes, which the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has said is crucial to curbing more overdoses, is among the lowest of any state in the country.

To Tyner, the mother who lost her son to an overdose, these are some of the resource holes that the settlement dollars could help fill. 

“We have an opportunity to open more beds, to create more community mental health centers, to make recovery possible,” she said.

The only government that reported spending its money to improve access to opioid use disorder medication or recovery residences was Horn Lake, which donated about $75,000 to a local treatment center in June. 

DeSoto County has used all of its settlement money for the construction of a new crisis stabilization unit, and Lamar County plans to do the same with its hundreds of thousands of dollars. But these centers are designed for stabilizing people in crisis or experiencing psychosis, and they don’t provide long-term services for addiction.

Melody Madaris oversees one of these units as the executive director of the community mental health center Communicare in north Mississippi. Centers like hers run both crisis stabilization units and addiction treatment programs, and she said local officials who want to prevent more overdoses should look to fund the treatment services instead.

Unlike private rehabilitation centers, addiction treatment programs at community mental health centers serve all regardless of Mississippians ability to pay. Madaris said that makes for difficult financial situations.

“We all operate in the red every year,” she said. 

Some of the Mississippi settlement spending that counts as addressing addiction is unlikely to prevent more overdose deaths, according to public health researchers. The city of Starkville is using about $15,000 for its police to teach the Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE, a program that most research indicates isn’t effective at preventing drug use. 

The city of Clarksdale’s deputy clerk said the government is spending roughly $36,000 so its police and fire departments can buy more naloxone, the opioid overdose-reversing medication. But Worsham, the Mississippi peer support specialist, said the criminal nature of opioid use makes it unlikely people will call law enforcement to respond to an overdose. 

“They’re putting it in the hands of people who are least likely to be able to hand it to the people who need it,” she said. 

David Engel, the Copiah County administrator, said he believes the drug court addiction treatment program his government is sending its settlement dollars to is amazing. 

But beyond that, he said he and the supervisors are unclear how best to prevent more opioid deaths. And the attorney general’s office messages saying the money can be spent on anything aren’t helpful.

“That’s no guidance whatsoever,” he said. 

Repeating history could doom future crisis response

Dr. Rahul Gupta, the former Office of National Drug Control Policy director, said it should be the responsibility of the state government to encourage local governments how best the dollars can be used to stop the public health overdose crisis.

Fitch’s counterparts in states such as North Carolina and Utah have developed instructions for how these dollars can best be used to prevent more overdoses. Fitch did not answer a question about whether she would consider making a guide like those for the local governments.

“It’s not fair to blame them (localities) for utilizing money in different ways if we’re not providing that overarching guidance to them,” Gupta said. He added that public health bodies such as Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health have created helpful national guides for opioid settlement spending.

Only one of the 147 governments, the city of Hattiesburg, indicated that it would seek input from residents who’ve been impacted by addiction to guide how it should use its settlement funds. It reported receiving roughly $54,000 in May.

Mayor Toby Barker said in June he wanted to seek the advice of families who’ve lost loved ones, addiction treatment providers and law enforcement officers of how to best spend its dollars.

“I don’t want us to do something to do something,” he said. “I want to see Hattiesburg make a focused investment on where it can do some good.”

Feinberg, the West Virginia University professor, said community input is the best way to make sure these dollars reduce the overdose death rate. She said other local elected officials may want to look to Hattiesburg as an example of what’s possible, as she thinks it could have the best luck at saving lives.

It’s important that these dollars be spent to prevent more overdose deaths not just for this crisis but also for future ones, Gupta said. The opioid lawsuits were modeled after tobacco cases in the 1990s, and a lot of that money didn’t end up addressing the public health emergency at hand. 

If that happens again, Gupta said, judges could be hesitant to demand response money for the next public health emergency created by corporations.

“It’s going to be very difficult to argue why these are required to abate that crisis,” he said.