How Are States Spending Opioid Settlement Cash? We Built a Database of Answers by KFF Health News

“Payback: Tracking the Opioid Settlement Cash” is a series that uncovers how state and local governments are using — and misusing — billions of dollars they’re receiving from companies that fueled the opioid crisis. For this installment of the series, KFF Health News, in collaboration with researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Shatterproof, a national nonprofit focused on addiction, built a first-of-its-kind database cataloging the ways opioid settlement cash was spent by state and local governments nationwide in 2022-2023. The three data visualizations we created for this piece are summaries of the information in that database.

The first is an overview visualization is a cartogram where each state is square sized by the amount of money it has received from settlement agreements. Within each square is a diced treemap further dividing that settlement money into three categories: Spent/committed, Set aside/not committed, or Untrackable via public reports. The visualization was built with Svelte and D3 and the embed contains a Datawrapper table for readers to look up specific numbers.

The second visualization is an alluvial diagram built in Flourish. It shows the dollar amounts each state spent (left side) spent on certain categories (right side). Because of the complexities of the diagram, we used Flourish’s Story feature to walk readers through how to read it.

Finally, a treemap, also created with Flourish, divides the money spent nationwide into the recommended abatement strategies in most opioid agreements and filterable by state. The visual is based on the percentage of funds spent/committed, with exact dollar amounts available in tooltips.