The prints were found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, which was once home to a large lake(NPS)
It was described as a windfall for New Mexico, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to turn the tide against an opioid epidemic three decades in the making.
But how far could some $920.5 million go, spread across the state government, counties and communities — as well as attorneys — over 18 years?
The money from massive settlement agreements with pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies, accused in a series of lawsuits of fueling the opioid crisis, has been trickling in, with the first payments arriving in April 2022 and the last expected in 2039. Slightly more than half, 55%, goes directly to the state, while more than 28% — a total upwards of $250 million — is funneled to attorneys, legislative documents show.
The remainder is distributed directly to city and county governments, with Albuquerque and Bernalillo County seeing the largest shares, according to a Legislative Finance Committee report. Some local governments began putting their money to work right away when the checks started rolling in. Others, like the city of Santa Fe, have been slow to develop spending plans, even as deaths and emergency room visits due to opioid overdoses continue to rise.
As the state moves forward with long-awaited regional behavioral health plans, in large part to ramp up access to critical substance misuse treatment, critics contend there is no way to follow the flow of settlement funds and ensure they are making an impact.
Santa Fe officials, who so far have $9.7 million available to divvy, have defended their inaction.
“Our goal is simple: to make every settlement dollar count,” Mayor Michael Garcia said in a statement Thursday. “Rather than committing these resources without a long-term strategy, we are taking the time to ensure investments are data-driven, impactful, and aligned with the City’s greatest needs.”
During the recent Mayor’s Homelessness Summit, Youth and Family Services Director Lia Azul Salaverry said the city is exploring allowable ways to direct some of the opioid settlement money toward services for homeless people.
“If we can pair shelter and housing with real recovery support, we can make meaningful progress on two of our community’s most interconnected challenges at once,” she said.
‘No accountability’
Anger over how hard-hit New Mexico has been by the opioid crisis resurfaced in recent weeks following explosive allegations by a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency official that the federal agency responsible for protecting the nation from drug trafficking allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to flow into the state while agents sought high-level drug dealers.
As state officials seek accountability in what could become a showdown with the federal government, the state and local governments’ spending on settlement money on efforts to remediate damage from the opioid crisis remains hazy.
The spending is tough to track.
Unlike other states that saw a share of what became multibillion- dollar settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors, New Mexico doesn’t have a central dashboard to track spending.
In fact, the state ranks near the bottom when it comes to transparency for settlement spending, according to the Opioid Settlement Tracker, a national database on how much money each state has received and who gets to decide how it’s spent.
Patrick M. Brenner, president of nonprofit think tank Southwest Public Policy Institute, said the lack of transparency is concerning.
With the exception of individuals filing public records requests to try to track spending, “there’s no accountability mechanism to ensure that these monies are being spent properly,” he said.
There are guidelines surrounding the management and spending of the settlement money. The funds must be spent on abatement of the opioid epidemic, which includes training for overdose prevention, medication-assisted treatment, expansions of recovery services and housing, transportation and job training for people suffering from opioid use disorder.
Brenner said he believes the limitations around how the money can be spent is too strict, which is leading to problems in getting it out the door quickly enough.
“We’re hamstrung by inaction, we’re hamstrung by the prohibitive nature of what the funds are being earmarked for, and we’re hamstrung by the public not even being able to know how the funds are being spent,” he said.
Strategies take shape
Santa Fe County moved quickly to allocate its portion of settlement funds on medication-assisted treatment at the jail.
County spokesperson Shawna Graves said in a statement 163 inmates received such treatment in 2025.
Bernalillo County and the city of Albuquerque contracted with New York-based Vital Strategies, an organization that sought public input over several months in 2024 with five town hall meetings, 15 focus groups and surveys with about 700 people with opioid use disorder, according to a report provided by the county.
The plan says the vast majority of survey participants advocated for increased funding for better housing services. Many of those surveyed were homeless, the report notes, and “they deemed existing shelters and temporary housing inadequate and emphasized the need for more options and improved conditions.”
Survey responses also indicate a need for an expansion of harm reduction programs and treatment services, the plan says.
Among the more than two dozen recommendations for Albuquerque and Bernalillo County was the creation of a joint advisory committee to oversee spending in the coming years and ensure accountability.
Wayne Lindstrom, Bernalillo County’s deputy county manager for behavioral health, described the challenges of planning to spend funds disbursed over a long period of time.
“The challenge became, how do we make some one-time investments over the course of the next three years that will enhance sustainability, while at the same time not incur recurring funds that we couldn’t sustain beyond year three?” he said in an interview earlier this year.
Lindstrom spoke of a “need to get much more upstream of these issues,” which is included in the strategic plan.
“If we could basically increase our investments in early prevention and early intervention, that would be money much better spent, and we’d see much better outcomes for our populace as a whole,” he said.
Bernalillo County and Albuquerque both made investments of opioid settlement funds to support expanding Albuquerque Public Schools’ counseling and clinical services to middle schools.
“APS really saw an important investment in expanding what’s available to high school students to their middle schools,” Lindstrom said.
David Morgan, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Department of Health, wrote in an email the agency has received $3.5 million annually for four years — or a total of $14 million — in opioid settlement funds, with at least $1 million per year set aside for addressing the needs of tribal communities.
The money has been used to expand medication-assisted treatment and overdose prevention through five contracts with tribal entities; to increase staff at department facilities offering substance misuse treatment; to expand the agency’s Harm Reduction Section; and to help direct patients toward medication-assisted treatment and public health care, particularly following incarceration.
S.F. ‘taking the time’
It’s unclear why the city of Santa Fe has delayed creating a spending plan.
Then-Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber declined an interview late last year about the settlement funds through a spokesperson, who said in a statement the spending restrictions made utilizing the funds “complex.”
“At this point there is not a plan in which to discuss,” the spokesperson said.
However, a former city official told the Santa Fe Reporter in 2023 work was underway to determine how to spend the money and she expected to present a proposal to the City Council in early 2024.
Community Services Director Sandra Emory, who joined the city in 2025, said she couldn’t speak about why the previous plan didn’t materialize. But she said the city must be strategic about how it uses the funds.
“Taking the time to figure out how to use them appropriately and really direct them toward where they can make the most impact I’m hoping will be time well spent,” she said.
Emory said the city is working on a “rapid landscape analysis” with Vital Strategies and hopes to move quickly to start deploying money when the analysis is complete.
The effort likely will include some type of community engagement opportunity, she said, though she was not aware of any specific plans.
The city has not added any positions to help manage the settlement funds, something Emory said might need to happen in the future.
While the city’s allocation seems substantial, when weighed against the damage addiction has caused in the community, Emory said every dollar will count.
“There’s a lot of intention being put into how we’re going to spend the money,” she said, “because … the overall cost of addiction and the opioid epidemic just so far surpasses the amount of money that we are going to ever see from this fund.”
Staff writer Nicholas Gilmore contributed to this report.
