The Maryland Office of Overdose Response is out with a handful of recommendations for state localities for how they can best spend opioid settlement money to prevent, treat and help people recover from substance use disorder.
The recommendations are nonbinding, but will inform city and county officials on how tens of millions of dollars can be spend in 2025 in their local areas.
The suggestions focus on five areas: Public safety, recovery, treatment, harm reduction and prevention.
They include concepts like include supporting programs that focus on families dealing with substance use, expanding street-based outreach, increasing naloxone distribution, expanding access to recovery centers and promoting alternatives to incarceration for drug-related offenses.
“We want to make sure that all of Marylanders have access to Naloxone, which is our number one tool for reversing an overdose,” said Emily Keller, Maryland’s special secretary of opioid response. “It's absolutely the number one life saving tool, and I think something that Maryland has really thrived at.”
The state is set to receive about $250 million over the next 15 years from the settlements, about 70% of that will go to localities.
Baltimore city opted out of the global settlement to sue the opioid manufacturers independently. So far the city has reaped more than $650 million.
This summer, the Maryland Department of Health released a drug overdose dashboard. Keller said the board wants the state to use the localized information to better place services.
Keller’s office will also announce its second tranche of awards this summer.
The group of awards will focus on community-based organizations.
“They're the boots on the ground,” Keller said. “They are doing incredible work. Some of them are smaller organizations that don't have access to grant writers, they don't have huge budgets, and we want to make sure that this money gets to them too. So that’s going to be our next focus area when it comes to the competitive grants.”
The state already awarded $12.4 million in grants to 28 organizations in March.
“These awards mark another important step forward in our efforts to rectify the historic harms of the opioid and overdose crisis,” said Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller when the awards were announced. “Far too many Maryland families have lost their loved ones to overdoses. The programs we are funding will make real differences in the lives of Marylanders by increasing support for critical services and care for people with substance use disorders.”
The March awards went to organizations like Baltimore Safe Haven for “support for mobile harm reduction services focusing on LGBTQ+ individuals in Baltimore City,” and Youth Empowerment Source for “support for youth substance use prevention programming and expanding naloxone access.”
