A newly established committee in Greene County is finalizing plans to utilize funds that continue to be received from a national lawsuit settlement.

Greene County Attorney Thomas Laehn says the county joined with several other counties and the state of Iowa as part of a nation-wide settlement of a lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies that were distributing opioids as pain killers and led to an epidemic of people being addicted to them. He points out that opioids also led to more serious drugs like heroin and fentanyl. 

Laehn notes that Greene County has started receiving money from the settlement and those funds could only be used on pre-determined items from an opioid use disorder list to mitigate the epidemic in the county. He explains the different ideas that there were tossed around about how best to use those funds.

“Our initial plan was to direct the money directly to some specific purpose. But when we realized how much money we were getting under this settlement and that there didn’t seem to be any single purpose that would exhaust those funds it seemed to make sense to kind of open it up for applications. Let non-profits, businesses, the hospital, come up with solutions that meet their needs and would be the best use of that money.”   

Laehn says a committee was established and has met to develop grant applications for non-profits and other organizations to receive the settlement money for their purposes of mitigating the opioid problem. Once the app