Resilient Bladen (NC)
Find the Full Article here: Cost of opioids outweigh money to address them - NC Health News (northcarolinahealthnews.org)
For North Carolina counties, the rates of opioid deaths were calculated by dividing the sum of opioid deaths from 2010 to 2020 by the sum of the annual population estimates from 2010 to 2020.
By Aneri Pattani and Rae Ellen Bichell
Tim Buck knows by heart how many people died from drug overdoses in his North Carolina county last year: 10. The year before it was 12 — an all-time high.
Those losses reverberate deeply in rural Pamlico County, a tightknit community of 12,000 on the state’s eastern shore. Over the past decade, it’s had the highest rate of opioid overdose deaths in North Carolina.
“Most folks know these individuals or know somebody who knows them,” said Buck, the county manager and a lifelong resident, who will proudly tell anyone that four generations of his family have called the area home. “We all feel it and we hate it when our folks hurt.”
Now, the county is receiving money from national settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors to address the crisis. But by the time those billions of dollars are divided among states and localities, using formulas partially based on population, what trickles down to hard-hit places like Pamlico County can be a trifling sum.
Out of one multibillion-dollar national settlement, Pamlico County is set to receive about $773,000 over nearly two decades. By contrast, Wake County, home to the capital city of Raleigh, is set to receive $36 million during the same period, even though its opioid overdose death rate for the past decade ranked 87th in the state.
Buck said his county’s share “is not a lot of funds per year. But I’m glad we have something to try to reduce that overdose number.”
Rural communities across America were harbingers of the opioid crisis. In the 1990s, misleading marketing by opioid companies helped drive up prescription rates, particularly in coal, lumber, and manufacturing towns across Appalachia and Maine. As painkillers flooded communities, some residents became addicted. Over time, they started using heroin and fentanyl, and the deadly epidemic spilled into suburbs and cities across the nation.
State and local governments filed thousands of lawsuits against drug companies and wholesalers accused of fueling the crisis, resulting in a plethora of settlement deals. The largest to date is a $26 billion settlement that began paying out this year.
As the funds arrive, some people say it’s reasonable for densely populated cities and counties to receive more, as they serve a greater number of residents. But others worry such an approach misses an opportunity to use that money to make a difference in rural communities that have been disproportionately affected for decades.
“You could really diminish what is effectively generational, more than 20 years of harm in rural areas,” said Robert Pack, co-director of East Tennessee State University’s Addiction Science Center.
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