Editorial: Florida should use $3.2 billion opioid settlement to save lives, not stuff jail cells

Local city and county commissions must decide, soon, how to divvy up hundreds of millions from national opioid lawsuit settlements.

“Blood money,” one Palm Beach county commissioner called it during a workshop, and that assessment is brutally accurate. The nation’s current drug crisis was fueled by a reckless, sustained abandonment of public trust. The numbers may look huge, but in some communities the settlement money will work out to just a few hundred dollars for every life derailed or ended by a decades-long failure to properly manage dangerous drugs and the foreseeable consequences when controlled-substance laws swung in the other direction toward overbearing enforcement.

Coupled with look-the-other-way state laws and physician-racketeers, opioid manufacturers and distributors made Florida the national epicenter of the pill mill epidemic. Prescription drugs were a springboard to the heroin epidemic. Now, it’s a lethal influx of fentanyl, cocaine and designer drugs that’s killing local residents.

To date, Florida has secured more than $3.2 billion from lawsuits. But the settlement money comes as signs of resistance to science-informed, lifesaving options are emerging.

Take the recent spate of election flyers in Lake Worth Beach city elections. They featured pictures of people on the street, slumped and possibly overdosing. (It is not known if the photographer called 911.) The implication: Spending money on treatment would be wasteful and ineffective and that the state should return to aggressive arrest-and-incarceration policies for addicts.

Nothing could be further from the truth, or more contrary to the stated intent of these massive settlements.

Arrests won’t solve problem

The Drug Enforcement Administration and law enforcement officials warned a decade ago that we could not arrest our way out of a drug epidemic.

In 2020, HCA’s JFK Hospital North in West Palm Beach opened a one-of-a-kind Addiction Stabilization Unit. A joint project by the county, the Health Care District of Palm Beach County and the hospital, the unit did more than detox drug users brought to the emergency room. It offered 24/7 medication assisted treatment, peer support from others in recovery from addiction, social services and help for families.

The idea was to break a lethal “treat and street” pattern: Drug users came to emergency rooms and detoxed, only to return to the street and overdose again.

Gov. Ron DeSantis praised HCA’s program. The state Department of Health used it as a blueprint to launch other units statewide last year. But the hospital has quietly cut back the unit’s initial scope.

Statewide, the number of drug courts, which order and oversee treatment for arrested users, declined from 94 in 2018 to 83 last year. Worse, the number of drug courts specifically for children and teens caught up in the criminal justice system has shrunk from 22 to 14.

Taking cues from Texas

Sentiment for evidence-based treatment may be at risk in Tallahassee as well. The Cicero Institute, a Texas think tank behind Florida’s law calling for rounding up the homeless, has its own ideas about how to deal with homeless drug users. So does Christopher Rufo, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ point person for dismantling New College in Sarasota.

Peer counseling, needle exchanges and permanent housing are all known to be lifesaving. All are part of the proposed Palm Beach County spending plan. All have been scorned by current or former Institute members or Rufo, and they all have this governor’s ear.

The state has a hand in how counties use the funds. Led by Attorney General Ashley Moody, the Statewide Council on Opioid Abatement will make calls on whether money is being used appropriately. It will work with the Statewide Drug Policy Advisory Council, led by Florida’s notoriously science-averse Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

Locals, though, are in a far better position to allocate dollars.

At the Palm Beach commission workshop, users in recovery spoke in favor of the plan. Mothers who lost children endorsed it.

Two county commissioners who lost family members to addiction praised it.

We urge local officials who will be making their own decisions on settlement funds to look the Palm Beach County discussions. That includes leaders in Orlando, Longwood, Apopka, Kissimmee, Lake Mary, Altamonte Springs, Deltona, and Sanford (among others) as well as Lake, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Brevard and Volusia counties.

Every dollar is needed

Ten percent of the money would be allocated to acute treatment. Nine of every 10 dollars would go to stable housing and related support.

Every dollar will be needed.

Spread over 18 years, the settlement money won’t go as far as many hoped. And just as oxycodone morphed into heroin addiction and fentanyl deaths, the current epidemic is changing. The policies that work today might not be viable in Year 13 of this 18-year settlement.

In December, a South Bay Correctional Facility inmate was found dead in his cell. Lying next to him, a rolled Bible page contained white and brown powder. He had smoked N,N-dimethylpentylone, a designer drug so new, it doesn’t yet have a street name.

The next worst thing is already here. The settlement funds should go toward treatment strategies that save lives and ignore the voices of those who claim that persecuting addicts is any kind of solution.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.