Berliner Tageszeitung - NY to hire 500 addiction recovery mentors with opioid settlement cash

The recruits will have battled addiction to alcohol or drugs themselves, recovered and been trained to help others.

The goal of the four-year project is to drive down overdose deaths. In 2024, 2,192 New Yorkers died from overdose, according to official figures.

"Too few have had access to substance abuse treatment and resources," New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at Phoenix House, a peer-led addiction center in Brooklyn.

"We are investing $12 million of the settlement funds secured by Attorney General (Letitia) James to support community-based organizations," added the leftist mayor. Behind him, an emergency overdose kit was mounted to the wall.

The funds will go to seven recovery organizations across the city.

New York like other US cities and states has received shares of the vast settlements agreed by pharmaceutical makers that profited from the opioid crisis.

As of June 2025, New York -- the US financial capital and its largest city -- had received $190 million and is set to receive $550 million by 2041, local media report.

Mamdani said those settlements were "returning the resources extracted by corporate greed back to those who needed it the most."

Between 1999 and 2023, around 806,000 people died from opioid overdoses in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Purdue Pharma and other opioid makers and distributors are accused of encouraging free-wheeling prescription of painkillers like OxyContin starting in the 1990s, while hiding how addictive the drugs are.

Last year, several US states reached a settlement with Purdue and its former owners, the Sackler family, with a bankruptcy plan that will see funds routed to affected communities and individuals.

O. Karlsson--BTZ