If we don’t write to our representatives about the opioid settlement money, they will only hear from the grifters seeking the cash cow, and that’s who they’ll take their cues and marching orders from.
MedPage Today reports that corporations “See a Cash Cow” in the opioid settlements and that “pitches land daily in the inboxes of state and local officials” – trying to get them to spend that money on all sorts of profit seeking and questionable stuff.1
Opioid settlements should NOT be funneled into the pockets of grifters running scam pseudoscience addiction treatment centers, especially not the ones that are basically trafficking people for cheap labor,2 and the money should not be used to make more punitive policing and to buy more garbage unproven tech nonsense that doesn’t make anyone safer and actually sometimes makes things less safe.3
And certainly this stuff doesn’t make anyone whole who has been harmed by the opioid disaster.
1
MedPage Today – ‘They See a Cash Cow’: Corporations Could Consume $50 Billion of Opioid Settlements — Pitches land daily in the inboxes of state and local officials – by Aneri Pattani, KFF Health News January 1, 2024 The marketing pitches are bold and arriving fast: Invest opioid settlement dollars in a lasso-like device to help police detain people without Tasers or pepper spray. Pour money into psychedelics, electrical stimulation devices, and other experimental treatments for addiction. Fund research into new, supposedly abuse-deterrent opioids and splurge on expensive, brand-name naloxone (Narcan). These pitches land daily in the inboxes of state and local officials in charge of distributing more than $50 billion from settlements in opioid lawsuits.
2
Reveal – Rehab work camps appear to violate federal law, senators say by Andy Donohue and Shoshana Walter November 24, 2020 At least 300 rehab facilities in 44 states require participants to work unpaid jobs in exchange for their stay, enrolling more than 60,000 people a year in the model. While the programs promise freedom from addiction, a yearslong investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that the rehabs are often little more than lucrative work camps for private industry. Participants often compare the experience to indentured servitude or even slavery. “Individuals struggling with substance use disorder who attend rehabilitation programs should never be subjected to predatory conditions that threaten their recovery and violate their rights under the law,” the Democratic senators wrote in a Nov. 19 letter to the GAO. Some participants work at businesses run by the rehab, such as thrift stores or car washes. Others work at local businesses. Many have worked for some of the most profitable corporations in the country – Exxon, Shell, Walmart and Tyson Foods. They often work side by side with paid employees, under grueling conditions. The participants often are ordered to attend the rehab by judges as an alternative to prison and face incarceration if they leave the program.
3
The Intercept – Detroit Cops Want $7 Million in Covid Relief Money for Surveillance Microphones – The company behind the mics, ShotSpotter, is going all out to guide police stations across the country on how to use relief money for the controversial technology. – Sam Biddle – September 17 2022 Not only is ShotSpotter a waste of money, critics say, but the system menaces the very neighborhoods it claims to protect by directing armed, keyed-up police onto city blocks with the expectation of a violent confrontation. These heightened police responses occur along stark racial lines. “In Chicago, ShotSpotter is only deployed in the police districts with the highest proportion of Black and Latinx residents,” the MacArthur Justice Center found, pointing to a Chicago inspector general’s report that found ShotSpotter alerts resulted in more than 2,400 stop-and-frisks. A 2021 investigationOpens in a new tab by Motherboard found that “ShotSpotter frequently generates false alerts—and it’s deployed almost exclusively in non-white neighborhoods.” The concern is not hypothetical: A March 2021 ShotSpotter-triggered Chicago deployment resulted in the fatal police shooting of an unarmed 13-year-old boy, Adam Toledo.