Cumberland County and Fayetteville are receiving another allocation of national opioid settlement money.
The city and county will receive about $575,000 from a $720 million settlement between eight drug makers and several states, including North Carolina. The drug makers involved in the settlement — Mylan, Hikma, Amneal, Apotex, Indivior, Sun, Alvogen and Zydus — produced prescription opioid pills that contained oxycodone, the pain-relieving drug credited with starting the opioid crisis.
Sanquis Graham, local health administrator with Cumberland County’s Department of Public Health, said the settlement funds will go towards the county’s strategic plan for how to address its opioid crisis. Community members helped shape this plan last year through a series of town halls in which they identified priorities like housing and increasing local residential treatment facility options.
“With the additional funds, we’ll expand our reach with this program and address the needs that the community has already voiced,” Graham said.
In total, North Carolina will receive $23 million from the settlement. Funding distribution varies from over a single year to a decade, depending on the company.
“These companies didn’t do enough to prevent misuse of the addictive opioids they manufactured and helped push us into the nationwide opioid crisis that continues to take lives in North Carolina every day,” Attorney General Jeff Jackson said in a press release.
North Carolina’s funding allocations are contingent on all eligible counties and municipalities signing onto the settlement over the next three months.
In addition to these funds, Cumberland County and Fayetteville could receive over $3.64 million over the next 15 years from a settlement with Purdue Pharma and the company’s owners, the Sackler family. Under the Sacklers, Purdue Pharma “aggressively marketed opioid products for decades, fueling the largest drug crisis in the nation’s history,” according to Jackson’s press release about the settlement.
Not including the drug makers and Purdue Pharma settlements, the city and county have received more than $35.58 million from national opioid settlements since 2022. The allocations, which run through 2038, funded a handful of projects, including the creation of the county’s Recovery Resource Center, a hub for substance use disorder treatment and case management services. The money also goes towards the Fayetteville Police Department’s LEAD program, a criminal justice diversion program that connects low-level drug offenders or those engaged in sex work with recovery programs and other resources instead of sending them to jail.
More opioid settlement-funded projects are coming. After a call for new projects to address the county’s opioid crisis was sent out in April, the Cumberland County Health Department will present four proposals to the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners in August. For the first time, the proposals were required to be a collaboration between a health care, substance use or mental health provider and a community-based organization.
If approved by the commissioners, the health department will work to get contracts in place by January 2026.
Cumberland County has seen a 32.7% decrease in emergency department visits for overdoses since it started receiving its share of national opioid settlement funds, according to data through May from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. From 2023 to 2024, the county saw its largest one-year decrease in overdose deaths since 2011, when NCDHHS started publicly reporting overdose data on its website. In 2024, 144 people in the county died of overdoses. That’s 46 fewer than the prior year, according to NCDHHS data.
“We’re doing really good as a county,” Louis Leake, Fayetteville Comprehensive Treatment Center’s clinic director, said while presenting overdose data at the July Cumberland-Fayetteville Opioid Response Team (C-FORT) meeting.
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the News Foundation of Greater Fayetteville.
