Mississippi News and Information

The Black Box: Inside Mississippi’s Opioid Settlement Funds

‘They’re sitting on money while people die’: Mississippi is years behind other states in using opioid settlements to address addiction

How we created the local opioid settlement database

Mississippi cities and counties, lacking state guidance, spend millions of opioid settlement dollars on general expenses

Each year since 2022, Mississippi has been paid tens of millions of opioid settlement dollars, money that is supposed to help respond to the overdose public health crisis. But 15% of those dollars — the money controlled by the state’s towns, cities and counties — is unrestricted and being spent with almost no public knowledge. Mississippi Today spent the summer finding out how almost every local government receiving money has been managing the money over the past three years.
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