Settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors are bringing billions of dollars into local governments across the country to help fight the opioid epidemic. Officials from across New Mexico recently gathered in Santa Fe to discuss plans for their share of hundreds of millions of dollars with state lawmakers.
Cities and counties are joining forces in hopes of making a bigger impact together than they could alone.
New Mexico is receiving about $884 million over the next 15 years or so, with just over half going to local governments.
Albuquerque and Bernalillo County announced a partnership to share their settlement funds earlier this year. And down south, the City of Las Cruces and Doña Ana County are also teaming up.
But the state’s largest cities and counties aren’t alone.
Shauna Hartley, a social worker who’s been on the frontlines of the opioid crisis, is heading up the Opioid Remediation Collaborative, a coalition of seven rural New Mexico counties.
“When you have a big challenge, when you have a big problem, you don't want to take that on by yourself,” she said. “You want to do that with a group of people, a group of counties that share the same challenges that you do.”
The group includes Catron, Cibola, Guadalupe, Hidalgo, Sierra, Socorro and Valencia counties..
What the groups plan to do with the funds is still being decided. Officials are setting priorities based on where the gaps are and what they’re hearing from their communities.
Mostly that boils down to funding medically assisted treatment, like suboxone or methadone programs, and expand its presence by providing more wrap-around services to support people holistically, and by expanding prevention efforts like education campaigns.
Earlier on in the process stakeholders suggested focusing on more effective approaches at keeping people alive, like safe-use sites where people can use drugs under medical supervision with clean supplies, and which studies show have never seen a death. But none of the draft plans include them as priorities.
Hartley said there are plenty of changes she would like to make, like allowing pharmacies to actually dispense methadone, especially in rural areas.
“It's very challenging to have an actual standalone methadone program in a rural area because of the volume,” she said. “You're not going to have a bulk of people coming to a methadone clinic every day.”
Hartley also said providers could benefit from working together directly
“One of the things that came up is that prevention and treatment providers oftentimes stand on two sides,” she said. “They either promote prevention or they either promote treatment, and unfortunately, they don't work very collaboratively together.”
She recommends they set up systems to share data so their work combating the epidemic is better aligned.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
