In Health Affairs Forefront, experts at Open Society Foundation outline 10 best practices that localities can institute to reduce problematic spending of opioid settlement funds:

1. Establish a protected fund
2. Adopt an anti-supplantation policy
3. Have people with firsthand, recent lived experience of substance use outline priority spending categories
4. Adopt lists of unallowable expenses (e.g., police equipment, incarceration costs)
5. Make settlement meetings open to the public and allow public participation
6. Issue clear, simple requests for proposals (as overly burdensome applications may exclude programs on the frontlines of the crisis that are operating on shoestring budgets and do not have time to fill out long/complicated applications)
7. Engage people with lived experience in grading proposals
8. Require clear reporting on settlement allocations and expenditures, with a publicly available dashboard
9. Publish lists of unfunded proposals (and reasons they were not funded)
10. Institute impact reporting

Why it’s important: The opioid settlement funds represent an opportunity to address the addiction crisis and should not be squandered on uses that are ineffective or unrelated to substance use and addiction.