Since 2022, millions of dollars have been flowing into Vermont from private companies accused of fueling the opioid crisis.
The money, extracted through national settlements with opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies, is meant to repair some of the damage caused by the crisis, which has wreaked havoc in communities across the state and killed more than 1,500 people in the past decade.
So far, the Green Mountain State has received more than $41 million with more on the way over the next decade, according to national settlement data. The bulk of that money goes into a statewide fund that the Legislature doles out annually. Some goes to paying the state’s legal bills for the cases, and the remainder goes to municipalities.
Vermont Public, in a first-of-its-kind analysis, has tracked how the state is spending its share of opioid settlement money. The news outlet examined national opioid settlement data, reviewed legislative appropriations, and followed up with dozens of municipalities — which don’t need to report to the state how they use the funds — to confirm their spending.
The money has funded outreach workers around the state to connect people to treatment, nursing services at some homeless shelters in Chittenden County, and a program to provide recovery support in Vermont prisons.
While the accounting is not entirely complete, Vermont Public’s analysis found much of the money locally has gone towards opioid treatment and recovery efforts. A number of towns have invested in prevention and education efforts, while several have instead chosen to invest in law enforcement. And many towns are still figuring out what to do with their share, which, in some cases, only amounts to a few hundred dollars.
While the state is expected to get more money once a $7 billion national settlement with Purdue Pharma and its owners is finalized, the funds will eventually dry up.
With the crisis still quietly raging, that’s left state and local officials with a conundrum: how to best spend this unprecedented, but ultimately finite, source of cash.
“I think we need to be thinking strategically about what will give us the most bang for our buck in terms of making some long-term impact,” Deputy Health Commissioner Kelly Dougherty told the Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee in October.
‘It’s not a bottomless fund’
Seventy percent of Vermont’s settlement money goes into one statewide pot. The Legislature is in charge of deciding how to use this money, though it has largely followed recommendations from the Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee that’s been tasked with reviewing projects.
For the past three years, lawmakers have appropriated nearly $28 million of the settlement money, initially with a focus on preventing overdose deaths, which reached record highs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Early initiatives included programs to test the street drugs for fentanyl and xylazine, funding for syringe exchanges and an overdose prevention center in Burlington, said Sen. Ruth Hardy, one of the members of the advisory committee.
But fatal opioid overdoses, which climbed at an alarming rate for nearly a decade, have started to decline. In 2024 there were 183, a 22% decrease compared to 2023. And as of October 2025, there were 93 opioid related deaths, lower than the three-year average through that time period, according to the health department.
“I do think that there's that tension between the sort of short term of saving lives now [and] the longer term of prevention,” Hardy said.
The Legislature has indicated it wants to annually set aside opioid funds for four initiatives: syringe exchange programs, expanding recovery housing, outreach and case management workers, and an overdose prevention center planned for Burlington. In fiscal year 2026, those four proposals cost $5.3 million.
The Legislature has also sent money to a variety of programs: funding specialized employment services for people who struggle with opioid use, teaching judges about substance use disorder and training them on treatment court strategies, and teaching people in Brattleboro CPR, first aid, and how to administer Narcan.
The annual settlement funds go quickly.
“If we continue investing in these things that either the Legislature wanted us to or the things that the committee identifies as like those big things that can have a big impact … the amount that would be available for new projects would just dwindle,” said Dougherty, the deputy health commissioner. “It’s not a bottomless fund.”
During the Oct. 6 advisory committee meeting, the group debated its approach as it reviewed the proposals for the next fiscal year — whether it made sense to fund specific local projects or ones that cover broader swaths of the state.
“Every time I look at this, I always see they're heavily northern Vermont weighted and that's a problem for me as I live in southern Vermont,” said Deb Wright, president of the Bellows Falls Village Trustees and a member of the committee, during the meeting.
For this upcoming fiscal year, for the second time, the committee held an open application process and saw an enormous response — 67 proposals.
The group ultimately whittled down the proposals and earlier this month voted to recommend 13 initiatives to the Legislature to fund.
The proposals include $900,000 to open 16 new recovery house beds, $248,000 to expand a program that allows first responders to dispense opioid treatment medicine in the field, and $288,000 to open a drop-in teen center in Barre. The committee had to make some tough choices. It didn’t, for instance, include the Johnson Health Center’s drop-in medical services site in Burlington, which received funding for the last two years.
The program, which costs $150,000 annually, mostly serves unsheltered people and provides them with wound care and access to medication to treat opioid addiction.
“It seems like right now, we're leaning very heavily towards treatment and recovery, and harm reduction really isn't getting the funding that it used to,” said Caroline Butler, a nurse practitioner and co-founder of the Johnson Health Center.
The drop-in site will shut down at the end of the year, Butler said.
“I like local things”
The Vermont attorney general’s office encouraged municipalities to join the national lawsuits — and many did. Each municipality gets a portion of money based on its percentage of the state’s population.
That means the amount that towns can get varies widely. Burlington, to date, has received nearly $720,000, while the town of Jay has received $188.
While there are guidelines for using the funds, the language is broad. And towns across Vermont have put the money towards a variety of uses.
The city of Rutland has used more than $120,000 to buy a van for the police department’s community outreach team.
“It's gonna have cabinetry in it, it's gonna have a desk and the ability to sit down, you know, talk with people,” Mayor Mike Doenges said. “It's equipped to be able to be out in the community and service people where they're at.”
Others have donated the funds to local community organizations that help people who struggle with substance use disorder. The town of Barre donated more than $31,000 to Turning Point Center of Central Vermont and Middlebury split nearly $90,000 between Counseling Service of Addison County and Turning Point Center of Addison County.
Some towns have bought equipment or bolstered municipal infrastructure. Lyndon spent $27,000 on drop boxes for needles and three defibrillators. Guildhall, which hasn’t spent its $1,000 yet, plans to use the money to add substance abuse resources to its website.
Municipalities have the option to send their money to the state’s fund, which some, like Panton and Lincoln, have done.
The city of St. Albans has taken a different approach. It put $160,000 towards its police department’s drug enforcement unit. The two-person team is focused on arresting drug dealers, in part by making undercover drug buys, said City Manager Dominic Cloud.
Cloud said it “overstates” it to say that St. Albans used opioid settlement money to make undercover drug purchases.
“We need to get the evidence to demonstrate that this person is a drug dealer,” Cloud said. “The city's committed to shutting down the drug houses. We have a street crimes unit devoted to that, and that's part of what we funded.”
St. Albans used another $30,000 to clear out a homeless encampment in 2024. The funds paid for trash removal and clearing brush to make it more public and less “attractive” of a place to camp, Cloud said.
“Philosophically St. Albans feels like we need to invest more in accountability than treatment,” Cloud said. “Accountability being a necessary step towards treatment, but the piece that we play in it is the accountability mechanism.”
Local control of the funds is an important reason for some towns that keep their cut of the settlements.
All but two counties in Vermont, Essex and Grand Isle, signed on to get funds. Caledonia County was the only one to opt to keep the funds locally, rather than send them to the statewide fund.
Keeping the $57,000 that Caledonia County has received so far within its borders was important to Merle Haskins, one of the assistant judges that oversee the county budget.
“I understand big government — I don't think I love it,” Haskins said. “I like local things, because local people know what's going on locally.”
Haskins put out a call for applications for the funds and got only one viable applicant: the community justice center in St. Johnsbury. The organization has used the funds in part to help pay for transporting people to in-patient drug treatment.
But many towns are struggling to determine what to do with the meager amount of settlement money they’ve received. Chelsea Town Administrator Tierney Farago initially thought the $243 could be used to buy Narcan to keep at the town office. That didn’t go anywhere. Farago considered giving it to EMT services or making pamphlets about opioid use, but that also didn’t pan out.
“I love free money, but then it was like, 'What are we going to use this for that would actually be effective for the town,'” Farago said.
The town of Weathersfield stopped trying to collect its $2,700, said Town Manager Brandon Gulnick.
“Just keeping track of like the constantly changing and all of the emails they kept sending to fill out reports, we just gave up,” Gulnick said. “The amount of benefit that we would receive from it, and the time that we would have had to allocate to it would have exceeded what we received.”
While the uses of the settlement funds vary, one thing most people agree on is the amount will never be able to fully make up for damage caused by a crisis that has exacted a brutal toll on thousands of Vermonters, including those who never used the drug.
Haskins, a former high school teacher, said he saw one of his former students fall into opioid addiction, end up in court, and die from an overdose.
“She had kids,” Haskins said. “I don't think you could put a number of dollars on how you would repair the damage done to that kid by the death of their mother.”
Sabine Poux contributed reporting.
