PORT ANGELES — Port Angeles city officials are now accepting applications from approved organizations to receive funding from an opioid settlement while members of the Clallam County Board of Health look at where to put the funds it has received from the same settlement.
Port Angeles will receive a total of $1.8 million doled out over the course of 18 years as a result of the settlement. The initial amount to be dispersed will be $100,000.
The state received $518 million following a resolution with three Fortune 15 companies that were found to have played a significant role in the national opioid epidemic in 2021.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson rejected the first settlement offer and went to court against McKesson Corp, Cardinal Health and AmeriSource Bergen Drug Corporation, leading to the $518 million settlement.
According to a December 2021 letter from Ferguson’s office, that’s $46 million more than what the state would have received from the national settlement proposed by the drug corporations in July 2021.
At its July 5 meeting, the Port Angeles City Council adopted an oversight/allocation method for the disbursement of $1.8 million funds. By approving this method, the city has created a process for receiving funding request applications, including the establishment of a subcommittee to review those applications.
The council voted unanimously at its Tuesday night meeting to open the application period.
Applicants have until Aug. 1 to submit their application and a subcommittee will review the applications prior to the city council’s Aug. 15 meeting, when recipients of the funds are expected to be selected.
The application is available at https://cityofpa-formsdev.app.transform.civicplus.com/forms/34570.
Applicants for city funds must be local government agencies or organizations within the city limits working to reduce the impact of opioids on city resources and residents. They must also be in good financial standing and have a program focused on Port Angeles that meets the parameters of the opioid settlement program such as access to treatment for opioid use disorder, prevention of opioid deaths/overdoses, education and training.
“I’m really glad to see this process move forward,” said council member Navarra Carr.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations this month about the impacts of the opioid crisis and it’s exciting to be able to get the funding to fund great programs that already exist in the community and to see if there are others in the community that will help change the direction of opioid use and how we respond to it,” Carr added.
Council member LaTrisha Suggs commented that while this is a step in the right direction, this problem will not be solved by a single entity.
“This crisis is something that I know personally,” Suggs said. “It’s not one entity that is going to solve the problem. It will be a collection of entities that are working collaboratively to solve and help address our citizens who need help when they are down and out.”
In the same settlement, the Clallam County Board of Health received $3.5 million to disburse over the next 18 years, with its initial amount being $209,505.
The Board of Health voted during its Tuesday meeting to give the settlement funds to the county Department of Health and Human Services to work on expanding the services at the Harm Reduction Health Center and the county jail Medication for Opioid Use Disorder (MOUD) program.
This will need to be approved by the Clallam County commissioners.
In June, the Port Angeles City Council held a special meeting during which they heard from Port Angeles Fire Chief Darryl Sharp, Port Angeles Police Chief Brian Smith and Clallam and Jefferson County Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry about the impact of the opioid crisis on first responders, city and county.
Sharp provided a brief overview of the history of the opioid epidemic, saying that over-prescription of opioids to treat chronic pain began in the 1990s; at the time, it was believed that the drugs were non-habit forming.
“By 2015, according to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), enough opioids had been prescribed to medicate every citizen around the clock for three weeks,” Sharp said.
Once it became clear that these opioids are addictive, prescription guidelines changed, he said. Doctors began prescribing them less and patients began to look elsewhere to get something to ease the pain of withdrawal symptoms, and that resulted in a spike in heroin and now fentanyl use, Sharp said.
Sharp noted that in his time at the Sequim Fire Department in the late 1990s, he responded to only 10 opioid-related calls over the course of a decade, but today, firefighters and paramedics respond to about three calls a week for overdose and almost all of those calls involve fentanyl.
In 2019, there were 95 heroin overdoses in Clallam County; 78 percent of them were in Port Angeles and 4 percent were fatal.
Data from the Clallam County Department of Health shows that opioid-related deaths have increased year over year since 2017, peaking at 24 deaths in 2021.
“There’s some initial concern that we would see a rapid rise in overdoses,” Berry said. “However, a lot of the overdoses listed in 2023 so far were related to methamphetamine and alcohol-related, which are still tragic losses of human life, but not affected by opioids.”
There were three recent opioid-related deaths in Clallam County and what made them interesting, Berry said, is one was attempting to seek treatment and the other two overdosed on prescription drugs.
“The first person was someone who had sought out treatment the day before they passed and there wasn’t an in-patient bed available for them, which just shows how difficult this system is to move through,” Berry said.
The other two deaths were from prescription narcotics, which Berry said is concerning and is a return to the way it was before.
More deaths have been reported, but the data is not yet available, she said.
________
Reporter Ken Park can be reached at kpark@peninsuladailynews.com.
