Kentucky AG gets green light to spend millions in opioid ‘blood money’

Kentucky’s Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission voted in favor of spending $3.6 million over the next two years on a three-part addiction prevention campaign geared toward youth proposed by Attorney General Russell Coleman Tuesday.

The funds that the commission is in charge of distributing, which come from legal settlements with drug companies, “represent the shared pain of families across this commonwealth,” Coleman said Tuesday.

He asked the commission for permission to spend a slice of this “blood money” to reach young people across Kentucky between the ages of 13 and 26. No members voted against his request, and no one abstained. The money will be split into $1.8 million each year.

Coleman’s campaign, modeled after a Florida initiative, has three parts. The first is an ad campaign called Better Without It, to be featured on social media, on college campuses and more. Coleman pointed to the well-known “Click it or ticket” campaign as an example that “these types of education campaigns can work.”

The ads, which will also be pushed by influencers, will be tailored to Kentucky, using photographers and creators who Coleman said can make the material “look and sound and feel and smell like the commonwealth.”

The second arm of the campaign is to “weave together” Kentucky’s “patchwork” of school-based prevention programs so kids have access to more cohesive resources. Lastly, Coleman said, the campaign will “elevate and draw attention to the ongoing work of this commission.”

Overdose deaths in Kentucky decreased in 2023 for the second year in a row, according to this year’s Drug Overdose Fatality Report. In 2022, 2,135 Kentuckians died from an overdose, marking the first decline since 2018. Ninety percent of those deaths were from opioids and fentanyl.

In 2023, the number of fatal overdoses was down to 1,984. Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, accounted for 1,570 of those — about 79% of the 2023 deaths. The 35-44 age group was most at risk, the report shows. Methamphetamine accounted for 55% of 2023’s overdose deaths.

From 2021 to 2023, around 460 Kentuckians under the age of 34 died from overdoses, according to that report.

“We know young people are more likely to be influenced by their peers than (by) someone who looks like me,” Coleman said. “Honest and productive conversations about the dangers of substance abuse among students can be a force multiplier.”

People in their teens and early 20s and those with a family history of addiction are most at risk for opioid use disorder, according to the Mayo Clinic.

“I’m asking you to zealously collaborate with us so that we can reach young people where they are to prevent them from taking their first — and in this environment, too oftentimes their last — experimentation … with this poison,” Coleman told commission members.

Coleman said “as little as one fentanyl pill can — and is — killing our neighbors. … We live at a time where there is no margin of error. It simply does not exist. There’s no such thing as safe, no such concept or notion of safe experimentation with narcotics.”

The commission was created by the state legislature in 2021 and has nine voting and two non-voting members.

Kentucky receives installments toward $900 million in settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors. So far, it has awarded 110 grants worth more than $55 million toward treatment, prevention and recovery efforts.

The commission next meets on Oct. 8.

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