(iPoster) Analysis of Legislative Language and Utilization of Opioid Settlement Funds

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Policy & Urban and Local Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Public Policy

Abstract

The opioid epidemic caused markedly harmful addiction and mortality outcomes throughout the United States. As a result of over prescription, an abundance of class action litigation against corporate manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of opioids ensued to hold corporate actors accountable for knowing promotion of addictive substances in a manner that did not align with reasonable, safe, or effective prescription treatment. States served as plaintiffs in many of these class action suits to recover costs related to citizen harm and mortalities. As a result of the corresponding state class action litigation, a federal settlement fund was created to assist individual states in implementing related policy initiatives within state jurisdictions. Consequently, states enacted legislation to govern and direct disbursement of these federal settlement funds.

Established law and public policy literature addresses two different theoretical concepts to provide foundations for analysis of whether these opioid federal settlement funds are effectively utilized: (i) the concept of legalized accountability and utilizing class action litigation to influence policy change and (ii) analysis of the impact of legislative content on policy outcomes addressed in policy innovation and reinvention literature.

In general, large federal settlements, such as the opioid settlement fund, are created with the intention to counteract harmful health outcomes that were perpetuated by corporate actors. Such intentions echo the purpose of the historically large Tobacco Master Settlement Fund created in the late 1990s. Similar to the opioid fund proceeds, the purpose of the tobacco settlement was to support health related prevention efforts in each participating state. In the case of the tobacco settlement, however, few states effectively funded tobacco prevention programs at recommended standards and used the settlement funds for unrelated purposes. In response to these spending failures, the subsequent and more recent opioid settlement was distributed to states with additional federal restrictions. These federal restrictions on state spending call into issue concepts of federal control over state decision-making and expenditures.

The broader issue is presented of how to learn from history: how can the federal opioid settlement funds be utilized in a way that meaningfully combats the repercussions of the opioid epidemic? This issue is even more important in the context of federal settlement funds in general: when corporations do facilitate mass harm to public health, and a federal settlement fund is established to aid state recovery initiatives, how can these funds be used in a targeted and effective manner?

This proposal utilizes data from the National Academy for State Health Policy to present a qualitative coding scheme to categorize state legislative content according to which entity within a given state has ultimate, binding authority pertaining to spending of state allocated opioid federal settlement funds. This qualitative coding scheme is primed for use in future empirical analysis to determine whether certain categorizations of legislative content, based on which state entity has control of settlement funds, facilitates varying policy outcomes that practically enable meaningful policy improvements. This study takes a step to develop an answer to the question of how to utilize federal settlement funds from corporations established to combat public health concerns. Because the opioid settlement funds were disbursed to states as late as 2023, this qualitative coding scheme is intended for future analysis addressing effectiveness of use of opioid funds as empirical results from spending initiatives develop in coming years.

Author

• Georgia Litle, University of Oklahoma