Kathryn Whittington decided to run for a seat on Northeast Ohio’s Ashtabula County Commission after an incident in 2013, when her home was burglarized by people in active drug addiction.
“I went around to the jewelry store and to the insurance company getting these receipts for everything that was taken and I found that I wasn't unique to this situation,” she said. “I was finding that many people out there working were affected by this. That led me down the path to: we need to get our community healthy.”
Whittington helped establish the Crime Enforcement Agency of Ashtabula County in 2019, a task force that used raids to take illegal drugs off the street and lock up drug traffickers. It partnered with a neighboring county and was funded by a state grant.
When the grant money dried up, the other county ended its involvement, but Whittington felt there was more work to be done.
So she and the other Ashtabula County Commissioners decided to fund the budget for the drug task force with the majority of the $65,000-$75,000 they’re getting each year from the opioid settlements.
“As grant funds for task forces across the state decline, it's becoming more of a general fund responsibility,” she said. “This helps offset that. If I got more, I could do so much more across the county.”
Last year, Ashtabula County saw the fewest fatal overdoses in years, with eight deaths. Whittington credits a piece of that improvement to the task force.
The case against spending settlement money on police
But some advocates for those with substance use disorder question if aggressive crackdowns on drug traffickers is the best way to help people overcome addiction. A Brown University study from 2023 found fatal drug overdoses went up after drug seizures, indicating people with substance use disorder could be in more danger after losing access to a trusted drug supply.
Dr. Sybil Marsh, a family medicine professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, says a punitive policing approach hasn’t produced a healthier population.
“We know the war on drugs is a failure, and that the court and prison system has not reduced the incidence of substance use disorder or the effects of that,” she said.
Marsh said funds would be well spent expanding police trainings that destigmatize addiction and teach police and first responders to administer the opioid-reversal drug Naloxone. These types of trainings, including the Ohio Department of Health’s Project DAWN (Deaths Avoided with Naloxone), have been found to reduce overdose deaths.
"You'll have somebody that will say, ‘I found the catalyst for my change happened when I was incarcerated."Pastor Greg Delaney
This debate around appropriateness of spending police settlement dollars has been swelling since the money first started going to communities a few years ago.
A coalition of nonprofits and harm reduction groups released a roadmap listing best practices for spending of opioid settlement funds. It asked communities not to spend any amount on police equipment or personnel, in part because nationally, “funding for law enforcement, jails and prisons already far outweigh funds for proven public health interventions like housing, care and treatment.”
Police programs gain opioid funds
In Ohio, 30% of the opioid settlement funds go directly to townships, villages, cities and counties.
The funds are required to be spent on opioid remediation, and some communities are using their discretion to fund personnel and equipment for law enforcement, who were often in the front lines at the height of the opioid epidemic.
The city of Green, just south of Akron, applied its settlement funds to cover the cost of Flock Safety, a law enforcement technology which uses video cameras to gather information about vehicles on the road.
New Philadelphia in Tuscarawas County used some of its settlement money to fund a second school resource officer.
Officials in Geauga, Madison and Paulding counties have embraced using funds for police-run Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E., programs.
In Ashtabula County, Whittington approved two $10,000 grants for police breathalyzer machines. Intoxilators and similar breath alcohol testing devices have become more controversial in recent years, after courts have determined they may produce inaccurate results and may be disqualified as evidence in DUI cases.
“People aren't just using one drug. They're using sometimes multiple, they're mixing with alcohol. If we can help get somebody assistance with these dollars, (that’s) absolutely (a good use of the settlement).”
Different approaches to aiding recovery
Those who work in addiction and recovery have mixed perspectives on sending settlement money to police.
Some say police need to be well equipped to help those dealing with addiction, and that a brush with the courts may be the wakeup call some need.
Pastor Greg Delaney, who works in faith-based recovery in Greene County, said he trusts communities to look at their needs and assess holistically where funds are best spent.
“If interdiction is a pathway to more safety, if interdiction is the pathway to some people finding treatment, … you'll have somebody that will say, ‘I found the catalyst for my change happened when I was incarcerated,’” he said.
Others argue traditional policing can set back long-term addiction recovery.
What experts do largely agree on is that the ‘just say no’ approach used in D.A.R.E. programs of the 80s isn’t the answer to youth prevention.
Linda Richter, a research specialist at the nonprofit Partnership to End Addiction, said today’s D.A.R.E. curriculum has been updated since then, but it hasn’t been thoroughly studied by researchers, so she said it’s hard to say if program is making a difference. Still, she favors programs that teach kids how to process their emotions and stress.
“When we get to that underlying cause of what is driving that need for young people and trying to address those needs early and more broadly than just focusing on the particular substance, we find that those efforts are much more effective,” she said.
But addressing those needs early and broadly isn’t easy, especially when communities only have a few thousand dollars to allocate.
This story has been updated with a correct spelling of Dr. Sybil Marsh's name.
