Minnesota’s new opioid law assesses a fee on drug manufacturers to pay for prevention and treatment programs — but backers are looking for additional sources of revenue. Democratic Representative Liz Olson from Duluth says,”One of the things we did not capture in the funding mechanism of this was the opioid distributors, which play a big part in this as well and are something that we left on the table in the compromise, and I think there’s a set of folks that are very interested in going back and approaching that again next session.” The next regular session of the legislature begins mid-February 2020.
Olson says more money is needed for prevention because a lot of funding went counties for out-of-home child placements — as it should have. “That did take a serious portion of the fund dedicated,” she says, “and so there’s more we could do as well in the upstream work that we could be looking towards.”