Why Do We Need This?
States, counties, cities, territories, and tribes are spending more than $55 billion in opioid settlement funds. That money is supposed to reduce opioid-related deaths and disease by funding evidence-based prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery. But the decisions are buried in long PDFs and messy spreadsheets.
And, as we all know...that money isn't always going where it should.
So we built something to help you sort through that data so that you can highlight good and bad spending in your community.
This tool helps you go from a messy spreadsheet to a polished report. It helps you catch miscategorized items to create a true accounting of spending. It helps you flag unallowable spending with help from OPI's state-by-state database of unallowable spending.
Introducing The OPI Opioid Settlement Sifter desktop app!
Get Started
→ Download for Windows 🪟
→ Download for Mac 🍎
→ Linux coming soon 🐧
When you're ready to load your own data, request an access token.
Let us know if you run into any bugs, and we'll help fix it!
How It Works
- Load any spending file (Excel, CSV, or PDF).
- Quickly and accurately classify each item as Bad, Good, Needs Info, or Miscategorized.
- Cross-reference Bad spending against OPI's state-by-state database of unallowable spending (includes a rationale written by experts at OPI!)
- Export a clean report.
- And, if you want, push your findings to OPI's crowdsourced waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement (WFAM) database.
About
It runs entirely on your machine. Your reviews stay local until you decide to export or share them.
It's free for community members, community-based organizations, unfunded academic researchers, and journalists. Everyone else (universities, agencies, consultancies, people with money, etc.) needs a commercial license. That's how we keep it free for everyone else.
We have put hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into developing this tool without grant funding or external support because settlement spending should be transparent and accountable. That said, we are committed to making this available for everyone with a pay-what-you-can pricing model.
Request access to load your own data →
Why Trust Us?
Jonathan Stoltman, PhD
Jonathan has worked as a researcher and advocate focusing on opioid addiction treatment and recovery since 2013. He completed his PhD in Lifespan Developmental Psychology from West Virginia University in 2019. Jonathan’s academic work has appeared in leading journals, conferences, and media outlets. He has been working on opioid settlement-related topics since 2020.
Why You Can Trust OPI
The Opioid Policy Institute exists to help communities improve their response to opioid-related death and disease. We provide evidence-based research and analysis that translates complex legal guidance and public health research into practical, usable insights. Our focus is on transparency, accountability, and community healing by increasing access to evidence-based prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery supports.
OPI’s analysis reflects a collaborative, team-based approach. We blend real-world and academic experience to help ensure our work is methodologically sound, grounded in evidence, and attentive to real-world implementation challenges. We focus on asking the right questions, surfacing tradeoffs, and helping communities build robust responses to addiction.
Opioid Policy Institute by Jonathan JK Stoltman, PhD is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
