Ohio will receive more than $1 billion in lawsuit settlements from distributors, manufacturers and other companies involved with prescription opioids. The state of Ohio has provided generalities but few few details on when the money will arrive, who will control it and how it will be spent.

To address this lack of transparency, Harm Reduction Ohio has created the Opioid Settlement Sunshine Project to publish information to help the pubic understand these historic settlements and, most importantly, whether the money is being effectively used to reduce the record number of overdose deaths (5,017 in 2020) and other harms now occurring in Ohio.

In addition, the Opioid Settlement Sunshine Project will provide plain language summaries and analysis to help the public understand how the money is being spent. (The documents below begin the effort to apply an open government approach to the opioid settlements.)

Harm Reduction Ohio President Dennis Cauchon will serve as director of Ohio’s Opioid Settlement Sunshine Project. Cauchon, 64, was a national reporter for USA TODAY for 27 years before founding Harm Reduction Ohio in 2017. He is a veteran investigative reporter who has written about the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 and many other topics.