Don’t pick this lock-box

Once again, New York state has come into a huge chunk of money. Once again, it has vowed to put it in a lock-box and spend it on a specific problem. And once again, the public has every reason to wonder if that promise will be kept.

The stakes are as high if not higher than they were with past assurances that the state would spend special funds as planned. In this case, the money is supposed to be used on the problem of opioid addiction, which has been surging anew during the COVID -19 pandemic.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that more than 100,000 people in the United States died of drug overdoses between April 2020 and April 2021, a more than 28 percent jump from the 78,000 overdose deaths in the prior 12 months. In New York, overdose deaths rose from 3,627 in 2019 to 4,965 in 2020 — a nearly 37 percent increase. Most of the overdoses involved opioids.

The pharmaceutical companies that produced the drugs and the deceptive marketing that caused this epidemic are paying billions to states to settle lawsuits. New York expects to receive $1.5 billion. Gov. Kathy Hochul included about $266 million in her executive budget.

The state created an Opioid Settlement Board to recommend — by last November — how to spend the money. But the 21-member board has yet to convene or even be fully appointed.

That hasn’t, however, stopped the state from moving forward. The money is already being carved up in the budget, with $900,000 going, vaguely, to “a plan or plans” drafted by the attorney general and up to $59 million for “a plan or plans” by local governments. It also allows settlement money to be “transferred to state operations appropriations” for the state Office of Addiction Services and Supports to use for “services and expenses associated with the administration of programs and activities supported by the Opioid Settlement Fund and in accordance with the terms of the statewide opioid settlement agreements.” The money can be spent without competitive bids or a request for proposals, and can be used by other state agencies. All that language seems very general.

Sound familiar? New Yorkers have already seen a whole album’s worth of songs and dances when it comes to special funds and so-called lock-boxes. There was the surcharge on gasoline that was to go to fix crumbling roads and bridges but ended up being used for general transportation costs like Department of Motor Vehicles salaries and Department of Transportation snowplowing. There was a fee on cellphones and landlines that was to pay for upgrades to 911 emergency phone services, which now receive only a fraction of the funds. There was tobacco settlement money that was to go to smoking cessation and prevention but is mainly absorbed elsewhere in the budget, with the state spending only a small percentage of what the CDC recommends for an effective program.

Are New Yorkers being deceived again when it comes to opioid settlement funds? Will money meant to save lives — to deal with the ongoing shortages of treatment beds, to ensure addicts have the medications and supports they need — be diverted instead to some “plan or plans” that have little if anything to do with the opioid crisis?

We hope it won’t. But history, and a board that hasn’t met five months after its work was supposed to be done, suggest otherwise.