Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Announces All $192 Million in First-year Opioid Settlement Funds Allocated to Serve New Yorkers Struggling With Addiction or Available Through State Agencies

Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that New York has made available all the funding provided in the first year of the opioid settlement agreements. This funding, approximately $192.8 million, is supporting a variety of prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery initiatives to help New Yorkers impacted by the opioid and overdose crisis.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

 Thank you, everyone. I want to acknowledge all the individuals who have joined us here today. Thank you for coming to this place, Argus, a place of hope, a place where people can find new beginnings. I thank them for their leadership here. Also want to thank our Attorney General who has been an incredible fighter to make sure that we take down the companies that are the purveyors of drugs that led to so many deaths unnecessarily in our state and making sure we have the resources to make sure that we can fight back and fight back hard. Ladies and gentlemen, our Attorney General, Tish James.

Our Bronx Borough President, a fighter in her own right, who seems like she's been on the job for a long time, but we're just coming up on two years? Two years. Vanessa Gibson, who's a dear friend. I want to thank her for all she does for the people of Bronx. We'll also be hearing from the chair of the New York State Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Board, Debra Pantin. I want to thank her. You'll be hearing from her in a couple moments as well. And also thank our elected officials, Luis Sepúlveda, Rafael Salamanca, a thank you for our Senator and our Councilmember for being here as well.

There's a story that I've told before about a young man who was in his prime of life. A high school student working after school at a delicatessen, just wanted to earn some extra money. He was a funny kid, cracked jokes while he was making sandwiches, and I had done similar work. And when you're working in a deli, sometimes you're called upon to use the meat slicer, which always used to scare me when I worked there as a 14-year-old, but that was a long time ago. I don't think there were child labor laws.

But this individual, one time the meat slicer slipped, and it cut his hand, requiring a visit to the doctor, stiches, hospital, some repair work. It was pretty serious. And the doctor, like so many other doctors, well, I can get you out of your pain very easily by just prescribing opioids. Now, his mother didn't know. His aunt didn't know, his family didn't know that your brain chemistry changes after about 14 days. They always give you about a 30-day supply with refills. But already your brain has changed in terms of how it handles the chemical substances. And so, this doctor, like many others, overprescribed.

And this is how so many opioid dependencies begin – not from some dealer on a street, or a friend who went to their parents’ medicine cabinet and stole something, like my own parent’s house was broken into when they stole their medicine years ago. But this was by a doctor, you know, who else can you trust more than your doctor?

And after two weeks of taking those pills, as I said, his brain chemistry started changing, taking his medication ultimately turned to an addiction, it turned into losing a job, abandoning school, stealing to support the habits because it all of a sudden became cheaper to buy this substance then get the high with heroin on the streets.

And all of a sudden, there's time in jail. There's time in a homeless shelter. There's time trying to get into a residential facility, but they're all booked and not available. And there was a time when you hit rock bottom and you just want to climb back up. I know this young man, knew this young man as my nephew and after years of struggles and literally a decade, we watched him start rebuilding his life – went back to college, was working on a master's degree, became a counselor to others who had fallen victim to substance abuse because he turned his life around, had a girlfriend, finishing up grad school, thought he turned his life around, had a breakup at one point, turned to something he knew well, which was opioids, but not knowing that all these years later, it's now laced with fentanyl.

And he was found, like many others, with a needle in his arm. That was in 2015, there was not a lot of talk about this at the time. There was not a lot of help. There weren't a lot of communities. There weren't support groups. It was just sort of the beginnings of what became a statewide and national crisis. But it's hard to talk about when it hits a family, but there are so many families that relate to that. Right? I mean so many families have had to suffer the unimaginable.

And in every town in America, there's people living with it. They're grieving their sons and daughters, their fathers and mothers, and they were stolen away. And a lot of people just haven't been getting the help. My nephew couldn't get help. We have been so committed, and I worked on this as Lieutenant Governor, to making sure that we have the resources to give the people who are the experts, the counselors, the advisors, the life coaches, the doctors, the nurses, who can help people find a path forward.

And I'm so proud, because a lot of these programs are important, but they haven't had the resources they need to really ramp up and be impactful. I’m proud that we can announce that New York has officially made available $192 million through the State Opioid Settlement Fund. And that goes directly, directly to helping those in need.

And we've made more settlement dollars available than any other state so far. This was from nationwide Attorney Generals and ours was the leader of the pack. We've done it faster, with more transparency and before you go, I'll talk about – we know how this crisis started. It was basically corporate greed. I mean, this is what our Attorney General dove into and realized the pharmaceutical companies knew the effects their drugs would have. But it was a business model that worked so well, because when you create an addiction, you have customers for life. Or until they die. Just like the cigarette companies, right? They knew what they were doing.

But the power of money and the greed was so strong that there was no consciousness or sense of social responsibility to people at all. They knew the pills they were marketing were addictive and lethal and they did so much to hide all that. Thousands of people died as a result.

Now we have accountability. Now we have a reckoning and the lawsuit filed against the opioid industry demanded they pay for the destruction that they caused, and the money comes to the people who need it the most. I want to thank our Attorney General for being that tireless fighter to make sure that here today we can talk about this year's allocation.

This goes on for many years. We're talking about almost $2 billion. This is going to be spread out over many years. And I want to thank the Attorney General for her work on this. I also want to thank our Commissioner of Health, Dr. McDonald, for his work on making sure that we do this right. And our Commissioner, Chinazo Cunningham, for her work with OASAS, making sure this gets done right. They are true leaders. Let's give them a round of applause as well.

But we have to move fast. Last year, and now there's a lot of knowledge about this, people talking about it more and more experiences, we still had 6,300 overdose deaths in the State of New York in one year – 4,700 deaths of which were opioid related. The numbers keep going up.

In the last two years, between 2019 and 2021, and something else was going on during that time, the pandemic, people lost connection to their therapists, their doctors, their support system. Overdose deaths in New York increased by 70 percent in that two year period. We thought we were starting to turn the corner. There was more awareness. We passed laws that stopped doctors from over prescribing, we did all of this. I was involved in all this, I chaired the commission at the time.

We thought we were turning the corner, we got slammed with that pandemic that disrupted people's lives. It just shook them to their core and a lot of them turned to what they knew could relieve their pain and anxiety, the stress of life. So, that's an enormous, enormous increase.

Xylazine. I mean, who heard of this a few years ago? I remember seeing the pictures in a New York Times article a few years ago, and the pictures of people suffering from this in Philadelphia. I was like, please don't come to New York. This is horrible. And at the same time, comes to light during the pandemic, we've had a 276 percent increase in overdoses from xylazine as well.

And in America, we've lost over a million people since 1999. It's a million people who should be with us today. That's almost as many people that Vanessa Gibson represents in the Bronx. And in New York, just from 2014 to 2021, 27,000 people. That's enough to fill half of Yankee Stadium. Except it's never half full. Everybody always wants to see the Yankees. But think of that, half of that stadium. People are gone.

The Bronx, why we're here today, has the highest per capita overdose death per 100,000 of any of the five boroughs. Richmond County, Staten Island is not far behind. But I know you know this, because you're out there fighting.

I'm grateful for the Argus Community today for being a leader as you continue to receive state funds to do your God's work here on Earth because it is so critically important. We're also working alongside other organizations that are well known, Odyssey House, Samaritan, Daytop Village, The Fortune Society, Jacobi Medical Center.

But don't think that this crisis is just measured in deaths, okay? This many people are gone, it's really bad. There are people living today among us who are still struggling. We're not just going to talk about those who we've lost, we're going to talk about those we're going to save. And when you think about the number of people who are unhoused in New York City, so many of them are addicted to substances and they can't turn anywhere. They don't know where to go.

So, building supportive housing is part of our strategy. Supportive housing means you build a place and in that same complex or even the same building the services they need are right there. There's someone checking in on them. Someone to make sure that they're taking their medication assisted treatments. They're doing the right thing. They're getting people to talk to them who are experts. That's how we start turning lives around. Not leaving people on the streets and turning our heads and we walk by. It is lifting them up, finding out what's wrong.

And this is in the category of mental health because your brain chemistry has changed – brain mental health. There are 4,500 unhoused people in New York City right now. Over 2,000 have been identified by our support teams that go in and talk to people – 2,000 have mental illness of which a decent, a good-sized percentage is from addiction. That's the population we get to them. We get them help, we get them service, we get them off the streets. And so many times people are afraid of people on the streets because they're not sure if there's going to be a psychotic episode where they can't control themselves, they hurt somebody. That's feeding into people's insecurity right now as well.

If they're in a place, they're in a hospital bed, they're in a facility, they're getting help, then they're not out there, possibly getting harmed themselves or harming others. Because people can't always control their behavior, and there isn't a single solution. This settlement dialogue is going toward prevention, treatment, harm reduction, recovery efforts, and youth forums. Have to get the kids before they go. Have to get them while they're still young. Talk to them, let them know. Let them talk to someone who's been through it all. These are the best. That's why I love the violence disruption organizations, people have been through it. And now people have also, on the other hand, have been through substance abuse.

So, we can do so much for them. More money will support recovery centers, as I mentioned. Transportation help, local government support for them as well, as well as the support of housing. Also, public awareness. The dangers of fentanyl. Fentanyl strips – if someone is addicted and they can use one of our 1.6 million strips to test it. Like, if my nephew had the ability to test it, he would have found out there's something in there that he didn't know was in there. And we have over a million xylazine strips as well, because that is now rising, as I mentioned, as another leading cause of death. It's sophisticated, it's multifaceted, there's not one answer, which is why we've been working so hard with our settlement board.

There are many ways to tackle this. And it touches every corner of our lives, our society, and it's always very easy to stigmatize people who are addicted to opioids. Oh, well, they're just addicts, right? Their lives don't matter? No. These are human beings caught in a cycle. And yes, there's deceit sometimes, and they steal from family members. Yes, they do. And it's easier to think of them as deserving blame. Let's not blame them. Let's help them. Because it's easy for people to say, “Well, that's not really who our family is. It's not.” They're all God's children. They all deserve a second chance. And there's people that are out there helping them. And also dealing with the dealers on the streets. Fighting hard against those individuals who are preying on our people who can't help themselves.

And again, back to the doctors. When this all started, you may not know this, but my husband was a prosecutor, the United States Attorney. He went after the doctors who were getting money and payments and gifts in return for giving out prescriptions. There was one up in Niagara County, who in New York State, New York, it's not the biggest county we have, this one doctor gave out more prescriptions for opioids than was done in the entire state. He had an industry going. He was shut down by my husband. Fortunately, it didn't help my nephew. None of us could help him. I wish we could have. But I'm here to help other families. I don't want any other family to go through what mine did that many others are going through. And we will not condemn those struggling with addiction.

We'll offer them help, and love, and support. And we won't abandon them at all. And we're going to continue to work hard with our teams, our individuals, everyone who's in this room is committed to a cause here. At the end of the day, because of these efforts, because of the money that came to us, thank you AG, more lives will be saved. That's what today is all about. Thank you.

And with that, let me introduce our Attorney General, James. And again, let's give her so much grateful applause for what she has done to help these families and these individuals.