Settlement Fund Reallocation Deals a Blow to Opioid Crisis

Settlement Fund Reallocation Deals a Blow to Opioid Crisis / July 9, 2025 / The Sandpaper

By Elizabeth Burke Beaty

The other day I woke up grieving and furious.

They just took $45 million – blood money – from New Jersey’s opioid settlement fund and handed it over to four politically connected hospital systems, with no transparency, no accountability and no guarantee it will be used to save lives.

This is money that was never meant to pad hospital budgets or cover Medicaid gaps. This is money paid by pharmaceutical companies that created an epidemic that has devastated families, flooded prisons and killed more than a million Americans.

This is money meant to heal.

Let’s be clear: These settlement funds were explicitly intended for programs that reduce overdose deaths and support recovery and healing. The state’s own Opioid Recovery and Remediation Fund Advisory Council developed a thoughtful strategic plan outlining how to spend this money. The $45 million diverted to hospital systems undermines that entire process and disregards the recommendations of experts, advocates and people directly affected by the crisis.

And they stole it.

Last week, I broke down in tears at the State House. I stood there thinking of every person we’ve lost to this crisis, of every mother who found her child cold on the floor, of every person we’ve helped survive one more night. Meanwhile, lawmakers were making backroom deals and getting ready for vacation time.

This is a brutal slap in the face to all of us fighting on the frontlines, distributing sterile supplies, offering treatment, driving people to appointments, delivering hygiene kits and food, supporting folks with housing insecurity. Our teams aren’t just “doing a job.” We are fighting to keep people alive, often underfunded, understaffed and undervalued. And now, we’re being asked to do it with even less.

How dare they?

This $45 million raid wasn’t just an insult; it was, in my view, illegal. New Jersey is a no-supplantation state. That means you cannot use opioid settlement money to cover expenses the state is already obligated to fund. Yet that’s exactly what this appears to be: a budgetary sleight-of-hand, pulled at the last minute, with no input from the very communities these funds are supposed to serve.

Even more alarming, this $45 million represents nearly 10% of New Jersey’s entire opioid settlement fund through 2038. If this kind of raid becomes the norm, the fund will be wiped out before we can make a lasting impact. That’s not just irresponsible; it’s fatal.

We know what works: community-based harm reduction, peer support, low-barrier treatment, stable housing, transportation to care, and wrap-around services. These are the very strategies that have already begun to bend the curve on overdose deaths in New Jersey. If million-dollar hospital executives and massive institutions could solve this crisis, they would have done it already.

Gov. Murphy, you still have a choice. Future governor of New Jersey, you have a choice. You can reverse this raid and call a special session of the Legislature to reverse it. You can demand lockbox protections to prevent future raids on the settlement fund. And you can ensure that every single dollar goes to evidence-based programs, as outlined in the state’s own strategic plan.

The families who’ve lost loved ones deserve better. The people still living with addiction deserve better. And the advocates and outreach workers who have given everything to this fight, we deserve better, too.

This is not just a policy decision. This is a moral line in the sand. If we let this stand, it tells every grieving parent, every grandparent raising their child’s child(ren), every struggling peer worker, every person in recovery that their lives and stories don’t matter.

But they do. And we’re not going anywhere.

We will keep fighting for the truth, for accountability, and for lives. But we shouldn’t have to fight our own government to do it.

Gov. Murphy, do the right thing:
 Reverse this raid! Call a special session. Lock the opioid funds for what they were intended to do – save lives.

Because if you don’t, the blood is on your hands and we aren’t going away.

Elizabeth Burke Beaty of Long Beach Township is founding executive director of Sea Change Recovery Community and Harm Reduction Center.