These requests were made in collaboration with a class of investigative journalism students at West Virginia University and their professor, Ashton Marra
In the last several years, industry giants have started to pay settlement money to state, local and tribal governments across the country. Billions in payouts will continue for nearly two decades, and, in most cases, politicians will decide how to spend millions of dollars on recovery efforts. The Data Liberation Project is working to follow the money and train our volunteer investigators to monitor whether cash is spent on the type of initiatives that help communities recover and save lives.
To track spending, we’ll file public records requests to local governments, then clean the data and build an open-source repository of spending. We’d like to liberate data in several states, but are starting with a state that had one of the highest rates of overdose deaths in the country: West Virginia.
Over the last several months, MuckRock has worked with the nonprofit Reporting on Addiction and students in a West Virginia University investigative journalism class to file requests to all 55 counties in West Virginia. The requests seek documentation and data on how opioid settlement money allocated to the counties is being spent and how decisions on spending are made:
- Documentation of the amount of funds the county has received so far
- Records detailing which individuals and/or programs have been awarded opioid lawsuit settlement funds from the county
- Any documentation related to the review or approval process to apply for funding from the county, including the names and organizations of individuals involved in the application process
- The application or details of any application process to apply for funding
- The names of the individuals who will review the funding applications
- The process by which funds will be awarded
- Minutes of any public meetings or hearings including county-level public officials where opioid settlement fund allocation was discussed.
- Any correspondence and attachments between county officials regarding the allocation or use of these funds.
- How much funding has been awarded as of March 1, 2025, and to whom it was awarded