“We had 11 overdoses and four people died in Ocean County just from Friday, Sunday, Monday,”
– Elizabeth Burke Beaty, the founder of Sea Change Recovery Community Organization and Harm Reduction Center.
On June 30, 2025, harm reduction advocates laid their bodies across the statehouse floors, holding fake bloodied signs. They were protesting the state’s decision to divert $45 million in opioid settlement funding to four hospital networks.
At the state’s request, harm reductionists and community organizers had spent 18 months building a strategic plan on how to spend New Jersey’s share of the $1.1 billion it would receive through 2038 from a lawsuit against opioid manufacturers.
Advocates say it took New Jersey just two weeks to ignore the plan.
The state offered only one justification: hospitals facing Medicaid cuts from the Trump administration needed money to keep managing opioid crises in their emergency rooms. But state law requires settlement funds to supplement existing government spending–not replace it. An examination of the hospitals’ own proposals shows how they plan to use the money to expand harm reduction initiatives and where questions remain.
“These are precious dollars at the expense of our loved ones and neighbors who have lost their lives to the preventable overdose crisis,” said Jenna Mellor, who sits on the state’s Opioid Settlement Advisory Council and leads the New Jersey Harm Reduction Coalition.