Petty politics blocks Iowa’s opioid response

Ask the governor, ask the attorney general, or ask any of Iowa’s 150 legislators what they think about opioids and the explosion of fentanyl abuse across our state, and they’ll call it a crisis.

Unfortunately, for Iowa’s Republican political leadership, it’s not a crisis they’re actually interested in addressing.

For the third year in a row, millions of non-taxpayer dollars that could and absolutely should be used to help Iowans with substance use issues are sitting unused in the state treasury. Right now, it’s $47.5 million — and that number grows every day with accruing interest and additional settlement payments.

The state is sitting on real money that could make a real difference in the lives of Iowans. Communities and nonprofits are begging for the funds so they can increase their capacity to help those with substance use disorders. And yet, Republican politicians have done nothing.

How did we get here?

Money from opioid makers and distributors started flowing to the state treasury in 2021, the result of national legal settlements in which those companies finally took a measure of responsibility for the suffering they created. At the time, though, Iowa’s attorney general happened to be a Democrat. The Republican-led legislature, in a fit of petty politics, took away Attorney General Tom Miller’s power to appropriate those funds, apparently to ensure a Democrat couldn’t take credit for helping Iowans in desperate need.

You read that right: Republicans chose partisanship over relief for Iowans.

Fortunately, before that legislation passed, Miller struck agreements with local governments to allocate 50% of settlement funds directly to cities and counties so they could invest it in local treatment services. To date, that’s the only help Iowans have received, because Republicans in the legislature have repeatedly failed to allocate even a single penny of the remaining statewide funds.

During the 2023 session, they didn’t even try. I called them out.

In the recently-adjourned 2024 session, dueling versions of legislation from Senate and House Republicans to allocate the funds died in the final hours before lawmakers left town for the year.

In 2022 and 2023 alone, 457 Iowans died of fentanyl and opioid overdoses.

What is going on here? In addition to the petty politics, Republicans are suffering from a lack of consensus over how best to allocate the funds. Republicans and Democrats in the House were united in insisting on an advisory board to ensure accountability in the spending of the funds — something most other states have done. Senate Republicans, for whatever reason, didn’t want one.

In the final hours of the legislative session, there was a chance for the measure to go to a conference committee — that is, a group of House and Senate lawmakers specifically convened to broker a deal on the issue. That’s how close we got to the finish line this year, but Republicans couldn’t agree among themselves to get it done.

The one clear conclusion we can draw from all this is that Republicans aren’t very interested in solving the opioid crisis in Iowa. It’s just not a priority.

I personally favor transparency and accountability. And while I argued against the Senate version that watered down those accountability measures, in the end, I voted for it because the most important thing is to get funds out the door so they can help Iowans — so that fewer Iowans will die.

Either we are committed to fighting this scourge to save lives, or we are not.

Enough of the politics. I call on legislative leaders to hammer out a compromise and make it a top priority when the next legislative session convenes in January. It’s time to pass a bill and get those funds out so we can save Iowans’ lives.

Janice Weiner, D-Iowa City, is an Iowa state senator and serves on the State Government Committee.