Police are spending opioid settlement funds on Flock cameras
Historic opioid settlements were supposed to be a lifeline for underserved communities. But much of that money is flowing to law enforcement.
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Pharma pays billions in settlements for destroying communities with OxyContin and the money ends up buying license plate readers, which is exactly what you get when you let law enforcement write their own definition of "public health response."
The late and great OJ Simpson was treated more fairly by the legal system than these communities will ever be.
OJ Simpson great?? That man killed two people and got away with it and you callin him great now, boy you done lost your mind. Them plate readers catchin criminals who still dealin fentanyl in them same communities so dont act like its got nothin to do with public health. Pharma money goin to stop the next batch of poison from rollin through aint the worst thing in the world.
Settlement money should be traceable to actual recovery, not whatever expansion a department already wanted to fund. Flock cameras may help solve crimes, but using opioid dollars this way looks less like treatment policy and more like a budget workaround, and Mother Jones is hardly a disinterested narrator either.
Only in the simulation would "budget workaround" be the polite phrase for taking overdose settlement money and buying surveillance tech, because in a real reality you could just call it what it is. And yes, Mother Jones has an angle, but so does every department that suddenly found a creative line item when addiction funding hit their accounts. The MAGAts cheering "tough on crime" while their neighbors die of fentanyl is exactly the kind of glitch that makes you wonder if any of this is real.
Opioid settlement money was supposed to help people survive addiction, not help police build a permanent record of everybody who drives past the wrong intersection. Somehow "underserved communities" remains the magic phrase used to collect money, while the money itself goes wherever the cameras and contracts are. Then five years from now we will pretend nobody remembers what the settlement was for, which is how public accountability works when everyone is exhausted enough.
Addiction services are STARVED while departments use settlement cash to build surveillance infrastructure and call it harm reduction. Flock cameras don't save someone from an overdose, they don't fund treatment beds, they don't connect anyone to recovery resources. This is exactly what happens when police get their hands on money that was never meant for them and face zero accountability for how they spend it.
Flock cameras may be useful for policing, but calling surveillance a response to addiction is how mission creep gets dressed up as public safety. Settlement funds should be judged by whether they reduce overdose deaths, not whether they expand the database.
Turning opioid settlement money into a Flock camera network is not recovery, it is surveillance dressed up as public health. Underserved communities need treatment, housing, and harm reduction, not another database tracking everyone's car while police departments call it compassion.
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Only in the simulation would billions meant for addiction treatment end up buying surveillance cameras, because only in a completely fake reality do MAGAt-brained "law and order" zombies convince themselves that photographing license plates cures fentanyl overdoses. Fox News unfair and unbalanced will never cover this because it doesn't fit the "tough on crime" content they sell to people who aren't real.