Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, how the billions of dollars in opioid settlement funds are being spent.

Abby Winnecker is an assistant scientist and professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Program Director for the Bloomberg Overdose Prevention Initiative.

She talks with me about a project to track these funding spend downs and about some of the expenditures she's

seen from the eyebrow raising to the truly innovative. Let's listen. Abby Winneger, thank you so much for

joining us on Public Health On Call. How are you? I am doing well. Thank you. Thanks so much for

having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So today we're going to talk about opioid settlement funds,

but to start us off,

would you give us a little bit of an introduction about you and your work? Absolutely. So I am faculty

at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and I am the program director for the

Bloomberg overdose prevention initiative. So we are an effort to support overdose prevention,

research and interventions across the country. And part of that work spans some policy oversight

related to the opioid settlement funds, which I know we're going to talk a lot more about.

And so tell us about the opioid settlement funds.

This is money that is being paid out.

How much are we talking about?

Who is it going to?

...