The Money Was Supposed to Bury Fewer People. A New Jersey Town Spent It on Cameras That Watch License Plates.

Finn McGinn wasn’t looking for a scandal. According to reporting from Hoodline, the Washington Township, New Jersey resident found the purchase order the way most people find things that later become news: by accident, buried in a public spending record nobody expected anyone to actually read. Three line items, filed over the course of a year, drawing from the same dedicated account: $35,000 for ten license-plate-reader cameras in April 2025. Another $7,020 for two more that February. A third purchase of five cameras for $17,634.99 weeks after that. Total: $59,654.99. Then, from the same fund, $117,946.70 for two Chevrolet Tahoe patrol vehicles. The account those seventeen cameras and two SUVs were paid from wasn’t the township’s general fund. It was Washington Township’s share of New Jersey’s opioid settlement money — dollars a pharmaceutical industry paid, after two decades of litigation, specifically to help a state bury fewer of its own people.

New Jersey has $1.1 billion coming to it over the life of its settlement. Some of it just bought traffic cameras.

That is the sentence sitting underneath every other fact in this story, and it is worth sitting with before the numbers start piling up, because the numbers are going to pile up fast. This is not one town’s bad judgment call. It is a pattern, documented now in ten states, and it rhymes — almost line for line — with a mistake this country already made once, with a different drug, a different decade, and a nearly identical multibillion-dollar settlement that was also supposed to buy public health and mostly didn’t.

What “remediation” was supposed to mean, and what it’s turning into

Opioid settlements exist because pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacy chains were found to have fueled a crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and courts required them to pay restitution earmarked, specifically, for “remediation” — treatment, prevention, harm reduction, recovery support, the infrastructure a community needs to stop losing people. New Jersey’s Opioid Recovery and Remediation Fund had received $200.9 million as of October 2025, on its way to that $1.1 billion total stretched out through 2038. State rules require that settlement dollars supplement existing public-health spending, not substitute for it — and they explicitly steer the money toward treatment, outreach, and prevention. Not police departments. Not vehicles. Not automated license-plate-reader networks.

Dr. Sandy Gibson didn’t mince words about what happened instead. Gibson, a clinician who owns Crossing Wellness LLC and serves as advocacy chair for the New Jersey Addiction Professional Association, called the Flock camera purchase “shameful” and was blunt about the mismatch between the tool and the crisis it was nominally funded to address: the cameras, she said, “will not prevent overdoses or stop people from becoming addicted.” Rafael E. Pérez-Figueroa, a physician and Rutgers School of Public Health associate dean who leads the university’s Equity Alliance for Community Health, went further, naming the category error directly — license-plate readers are “a law enforcement and surveillance tool, not an evidence-based public health intervention” — and warned that expanding street-level surveillance in communities already struggling with addiction risks pushing people who use drugs further into isolation, exactly the opposite of what actually reduces overdose deaths. Isolation is not a side effect of the opioid crisis. It is one of its engines: people who use alone, away from anyone who might intervene, are the people naloxone can’t reach in time.

Washington Township isn’t the outlier. It’s the sample size.

A national investigation traced this same pattern across the country. Reporting corroborated by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Cybernews found at least 19 law-enforcement agencies across 10 states have directed more than $920,000 in opioid settlement funds toward Flock Safety and competing automated license-plate-reader systems from Motorola, Axon, and Verkada. Six of those jurisdictions went further, spending settlement dollars on Peregrine Technologies — an AI platform that fuses plate-reader feeds with body-camera footage and police records into a single searchable surveillance layer. Internal materials from a security-industry firm reportedly described opioid settlement funds, openly, as “a major new opportunity” for surveillance vendors to pursue. That is not a euphemism. That is a sales pitch, aimed at a $50-billion-plus national settlement pool that state legislatures wrote almost no meaningful guardrails around, built on the assumption that local officials would spend restitution money the way the litigation intended it.

Internal materials from a security-industry firm reportedly described opioid settlement funds, openly, as “a major new opportunity” for surveillance vendors to pursue.

New Jersey alone has documented roughly $2.3 million in settlement-fund “misuse” spread across dozens of towns — a number that almost certainly understates the real total, for a reason that matters more than the number itself: there is no comprehensive national requirement that any jurisdiction publicly report the full detail of how it spends opioid settlement money. The one hard national deadline on the books — September 30, 2026, arriving in three weeks — only compels states and subdivisions to file a “Non-Opioid Remediation Use Report” disclosing spending that does not qualify as remediation, under the terms baked into the distributor and manufacturer settlement agreements themselves. It does not require a full public accounting of the money spent correctly. KFF Health News, tracking this in partnership with Johns Hopkins and Shatterproof, has documented more than 10,500 individual expenditures nationwide — and says plainly that its own database “does not represent all opioid settlement expenditures,” because many jurisdictions simply don’t produce public reports at all. The accountability structure isn’t broken. In the sense that would let a resident like Finn McGinn or a reporter reliably catch every diversion, it barely exists.

We have been here before, with a different drug and the same math

This is not the first time a state took a multibillion-dollar public-health settlement and let it evaporate into things that weren’t public health. In 1998, forty-six states settled with the tobacco industry for $246 billion over 25 years — the largest civil settlement in U.S. history at the time, negotiated explicitly to fund smoking prevention and cessation alongside the healthcare costs tobacco had caused. Within a few years, states were routing that money into general budgets, road construction, tax cuts, anything but the programs the settlement was written to fund. The habit never really broke. The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids’ 2026 state-by-state accounting found that states will collect $21.7 billion this year in combined tobacco settlement payments and tobacco taxes — and will spend just 3.4% of it, $728.6 million, on prevention and cessation programs. That’s roughly 22% of the $3.3 billion the CDC itself recommends. Only one state, Maine, currently funds tobacco prevention at the CDC-recommended level. Twenty-eight years later, the tobacco settlement’s own accounting proves the diversion habit didn’t fade with time. It calcified into normal practice.

If you’re tracking the opioid settlement money because you or someone you love needed what it was supposed to buy, this is the part that should make you angry rather than resigned: the country has run this exact experiment before, watched the money drift away from the people it was for, and built the next settlement — this one — with almost none of the lessons applied. The dollar signs changed. The instinct to reach for anything but the hard, unglamorous work of funding treatment did not.

What the money could have bought instead

None of this is abstract if you’re the person the settlement was actually written for. Maia Szalavitz — who has spent decades reporting on addiction after living through her own, and whose case for compassion over confrontation draws on both — makes a claim that cuts directly against the surveillance logic Washington Township just funded: “Feeling valued by others is what tends to prompt recovery.” Not being watched. Not being tracked by a camera network built to flag a license plate. Being connected to something — a program, a person, a door that opens instead of one that closes. Surveillance infrastructure and connection infrastructure aren’t just different tools; they send opposite signals to the person who most needs to hear one of them. A camera says: we are watching you, waiting for you to do something wrong. A caseworker, a peer-support line, a real next-day appointment says: we expected you’d need help, and we built something for when you did. The settlement money was supposed to buy the second thing. Seventeen cameras and two Tahoes bought the first.

Being connected to something — a program, a person, a door that opens instead of one that closes.

If you have ever needed a treatment bed that wasn’t there, or a peer-support call that never came, know this: the money for it may well have existed. It may have been sitting in an account with your county’s name on it, spent instead on something built to watch you rather than help you. That is not a hypothetical. It is roughly $920,000 of it, documented, in ten states, this year alone — and an unknown amount more that nobody has been required to report.

There is a genuinely different way this money is moving elsewhere, right now, which matters precisely because it proves the alternative isn’t hypothetical either. HHS announced $383.4 million in new behavioral health and crisis-response grants this week — money aimed at 988 crisis lines, mobile crisis teams, and substance use treatment capacity, moving in the direction settlement funds were always supposed to move. It is possible to spend a public-health windfall on public health. New Jersey’s own $1.1 billion proves the money exists. Washington Township’s seventeen cameras prove that having the money and spending it on the thing it was meant for are two entirely separate battles — and right now, in more places than anyone has fully counted, the second battle is being lost quietly, one purchase order at a time, waiting for someone like Finn McGinn to notice.