The city of Durham is poised to allocate nearly $1 million to support organizations on the frontlines of the opioid crisis.
The funding stems from a nationwide settlement agreement between state governments and giant pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors like McKesson and Johnson & Johnson who were held responsible for their role in the opioid epidemic.
Attorneys general across the country, including now North Carolina governor Josh Stein, brought cases against the drug companies, accusing them of exacerbating the opioid epidemic. The litigation has culminated in over $26 billion being awarded to state and local governments across the US, with more funding potentially being awarded as future litigation against companies like Purdue is settled.
North Carolina received $1.4 billion in the initial settlement, which will be distributed to local municipalities over 18 years from 2022 to 2038. Local governments that receive payouts are required to report how they distribute the money. The City of Durham is set to receive $4.5 million total over the 18-year period. Additionally, Durham County will receive $21.7 million over the same period.
At a work session last week, Durham city council awarded their first round of payouts to three groups following the city’s RFP process which concluded last November.
Lincoln Community Health Center is poised to receive an estimated $424,478. The longstanding community hospital will invest the funds in its medication-assisted treatment (MAT) program by expanding operations at its main clinic on Fayetteville Street, Lakewood satellite clinic, and its Healthcare for the Homeless site.
Durham Technical Community College would receive $239,688 which the school plans to use toward Project MAPS (Mobile Addiction Treatment & Primary Care Services) a collaboration between Durham Technical Community College, Duke Health and the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition that provides mobile treatment units for afflictions like HIV and Hepatitis C throughout the community. The funding will support improving mobile lab equipment needed for lab work and testing, as well as additional staff.
Additionally, the Durham Community Safety Department is receiving $267,721 to hire a Peer Support Specialist who would serve as a harm reduction coordinator with the HEART team. The funding will also allow HEART to expand their Safe Syringe Program and provide additional recovery support services.
The initial contract for the opioid settlement funding is for three years. Funding won’t be officially released until the city council approves its consent agenda at the March 17 city council meeting.
Opioid addiction has ravaged the country for years. A recent uptick in drug overdose deaths due to the proliferation of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid much stronger than over-the-counter products like oxycodone or street drugs like heroin, has brought the fight against the opioid addiction front and center. North Carolina alone experienced a 22 percent percent increase in drug overdose deaths between 2019 and 2021.
In Durham, 185 people died from overdoses between 2020 and 2021, according to Durham County public health data. Durham Emergency Medical Services (EMS) responded to 481 opioid overdoses in 2020 and over 850 opioid overdoses in 2021. The department says the increase in overdose numbers likely stems from the “stress and isolation” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A number of agencies are working to intervene in the cycles of addiction and improve health outcomes for Durham residents.
Durham Tech Community Health Lab (CHL) has been providing health care access to members of underserved communities in Durham and Orange counties since 2020. In 2023, they partnered with Duke Health and the North Carolina Harm and Reduction Coalition to create Project MAPS, which provides “evidence-based medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, primary care services, and comprehensive harm reduction, including naloxone for overdose prevention and syringe services.”
Whitney Young, community health lab coordinator at Durham Tech, has been leading the program since its inception. She says the health lab is an opportunity for the school to further entrench itself in the communities it serves.
“Durham Tech has community in the name,” Young says. “In our minds, this is a way that we could expand our reach in helping the community, but also, we’d love to involve our student learners in any way that we can, because we want to help shape them to become better, empathetic practitioners for the future.”
Young’s team visits regular sites twice a month, encountering an average of 30 individuals in need of health interventions. The lab carries medications, drugs used for overdose prevention like naloxone, and other tools to collect samples for further testing. Young says that the mobile unit isn’t currently equipped to run certain tests, but the additional funding from the opioid settlement could go a long way in helping to build out the unit’s capabilities.
Many agencies are concerned about losing access to federal funding as it becomes increasingly less reliable thanks to Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn approach as the architect behind the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the same city work session where the city council agreed to move forward on deploying settlement funding, folks affected by the halting of foreign aid funding were in attendance asking the council to join them in publicly decrying the funding cuts. For the CHL team, finding funding sources is “a weekly agenda item,” regardless of who is in office.
“This is a huge gamechanger for an organization like ours,” Young says of the funding.
About half of the patients that are served by Project MAPS are insured through Medicaid, Young says, and another 40 percent are uninsured. CHL is able to provide free prescriptions through a partnership sponsored by Alliance Health. Loss of coverage for patients due to cuts to Medicaid—which have been floated by the Trump administration—would have a major impact on access to treatment and important medications like Suboxone, used to treat opioid dependence.
“If we were to see a loss of Medicaid coverage for our folks in North Carolina, programs like ours, other free clinics providing services to the uninsured would be increasingly relied on,” Young says. “The cost of medications, though, would still be a barrier that our patients would have to navigate.”
More funding from the lawsuits against Big Pharma could provide the city and county with additional resources to invest in programs like CHL and others. Councilmember Nate Baker, who often uses his platform to denounce the billionaire class (like the Sacklers who owned Purdue Pharma and are widely considered the main antagonists in the opioid epidemic) said he was thankful to see Durham get the resources it needs to try and combat opioid addiction, one of the country’s most severe health challenges.
“I think people are so used to billionaires like the Sackler family not only getting away with but being rewarded for their crimes that it’s almost shocking to see a minor semblance of justice served in the form of settlement money distributed to local governments to help stem opioid addiction,” Baker says. “Billionaires and regular people are punished unequally and there is not enough money in the world to fully make things right. Nevertheless, these are critical resources and Durham and our partners will use them well.”
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to jlaidlaw@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.