By Hon. Michael P. Flanagan, Opinion Contributor
Since 2013, more than 21,400 Illinoisians have lost their lives to opioid overdoses.
This crisis, which has claimed more than 600,000 lives nationally, has given rise to lawsuits from every corner of our country. Some are private but many are public where individual states and municipalities have sued sellers, distributors and manufacturers of legal but abused opioids. Most of these suits have subsequently been resolved through settlements with names as big as CVS, Walgreens and Johnson & Johnson.
The share coming to Illinois is expected to be $1.3 billion and to date, the state has received about $200 million of that. As this money comes in, Illinois legislators will be tempted to spend that money on budget priorities other than this health crisis. Does anyone remember the “gambling proceeds for education” promises? Let’s not go there again.
Illinois has the chance to put money to work usefully and profitably if it acts correctly now.
How much money is being spent on those struggling with addition? On homelessness? On workplace accidents and absenteeism? On wrongful deaths? It is a huge sum that could be saved by the taxpayer if this money is properly and quickly allocated to stamp out the opioid crisis that has caused these issues.
How will Illinois spend it? Well, the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Illinois’ Attorney General have stated that the money from the settlements will be split several ways: 55 percent going to a remediation fund; while the rest will be divided between state administrative costs and local governments.
This is a disappointing statement of priorities. As someone who speaks “government-ese” professionally, I can tell you that this means the money will likely be allocated to government growth in order to appear to be doing something. Government bureaucracy is not the answer here.
If we can use this resource well, right now, we can stem and even beat this problem without expenditures of the people’s revenue in the future. Let’s get it right the first time.
The private sector holds the greatest potentiality for this precious resource. Just a few examples of successful expenditures to fight the legal and illegal opioid crisis are public/private partnerships.
For example, in Wisconsin, $3 million is set to be distributed to police departments and sheriff’s offices through a competitive application process to support community drug disposal programs. These programs keep people with an opioid use disorder out of jail and get them medication-assisted treatment, education and awareness training. More police departments are also teaming with mental health clinicians—including psychologists—out in the field or behind the scenes via crisis intervention training to reduce deaths.
In fact, there are many such programs where private entities are working in cooperation with the police and other governmental agencies can affect change and save money and lives at the same time. Illinois should be proactively seeking such programs and ideas to best fit the Prairie State’s needs in this area.
In Massachusetts, for example, local officials are holding public meetings to solicit ideas and considering new investments in such solutions as mobile crisis response teams, transitional housing, and improved access to medications that treat addiction. People and experts in this field will be the root of the solution for this crisis, not the government.
When will Illinois spend this money? As of April, a complex bureaucratic process for distributing the funds had put only a tiny fraction of the money into the hands of organizations dealing with the crisis. Of the money that was distributed, most of it had been sent to government bureaucracies that would have less of an immediate impact, like the Illinois prescription monitoring program (PMP). As Jud DeLoss, the CEO of the Illinois Association for Behavioral Health and member of the Illinois Opioid Remediation Advisory Board has noted, it is “clearly not a life or death situation to fund the PMP.”
Fortunately, after a slow rollout this spring, there is some indication that the money is finally being distributed faster and things are on track. However, it is important that leaders learn from their initial missteps and do not again fall behind on distributing funds in a timely fashion. They must also earmark them for much better priorities because, if properly spent, this money could save billions in future expenditures while saving lives now.
While politicians squabble to take the money and increase their bureaucratic fiefdoms, the people are shorted. Ideas offered like those imaginatively working the problem in other states are easily applicable here and should be identified and at least provisionally funded in short order. Government should trust the people and the people should demand that trust. Illinois must not waste this windfall.
Michael Patrick Flanagan is a former U.S. Congressman who represented Illinois’ 5th District and served on the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight
