Those who have personally experienced the impact of Baltimore’s overdose crisis now have a pronounced role in guiding the city’s efforts to combat it, marking the beginning of a new chapter in a decades-long struggle.
Mayor Brandon Scott swore in 20 members of the city’s new Opioid Restitution Advisory Board last week, eight of whom were chosen because of their personal history with substance use disorder and overdose. The board — composed of 17 voting members and three non-voting members — is one of numerous new initiatives first announced last year to help determine how the city’s hundreds of millions of dollars in opioid settlement funds will be spent to address the crisis.
“I believe that the people who are closer to the problem are the ones with solutions,” said Ricarra Jones, political director for the 1199 Service Employees International Union and acting president of the Baltimore City NAACP. “I lived in a home with family members who dealt with addiction for the majority of my childhood. It’s just something that is very personal to me — being a child and living through it and having lost family and friends to overdose and addiction.”
As the city mulls how to spend its windfall of restitution funds, it’s her personal and professional experience that she brings to the table, Jones said. As a member of a health care union, she fights for workers on the frontlines of the overdose crisis on a daily basis.
Officials have described the board’s creation as the beginning of a renewed effort to save lives — one that emphasizes transparency and decisions based on personal experience and evidence. The emphasis on transparency comes after Scott's administration for months refused to comment on most matters related to the crisis and successfully pressured City Council members to cancel public hearings, citing ongoing litigation against opioid distributors.
More than 180 people applied for the board positions, Scott said last week. After a selection committee narrowed down the field, a separate committee composed of experts in the substance use field chose the final candidates. The mayor then approved the selections.
Board members were limited in what they could talk about during interviews, as city officials said doing so could negatively impact the city’s ongoing litigation. Yet all the board members echoed the importance of including voices such as theirs as the city looks to put a historic amount of settlement funds to use.
Paul Archibald, a licensed clinical social worker who has worked in programs to address substance use, mental health, and racial trauma, entered the field after experiencing the “crack epidemic” in the 1980s, a seminal moment in the War on Drugs.
But he also recounted the trauma associated with his personal experiences.
One winter, his godson died of an overdose in the middle of the street on a freezing winter day, he said. To this day, the cold provokes a visceral reaction that reminds him of the conditions in which he died. He lives with that pain today — one that is compounded by the fact his son also overdosed.
“It’s not just lived experience, it’s living experience,” Archibald said. “It’s ongoing experience. How can you have anything about anything without people who’ve been involved in it? It’s for us, by us. We have a clear understanding of what would be needed firsthand.”
Paris Barnes, a senior training specialist with the PATIENTS Program at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, watched her biological father struggle with addiction when she was a child.
“Lived experience means we have watched it happen,” Barnes said. “We have a shared interest in what happens moving forward. We’re from Baltimore; this is our city. This is our people, this is who we are. We represent our people, and it’s important we do this because this is us.”
Other board members were not only surrounded by chaotic drug use and overdoses but also struggled through the grips of addiction firsthand.
Carlos Hardy, who has spent more than 30 years offering substance use disorder treatment in Baltimore, is in long-term recovery himself — and has been sober for roughly the same amount of time.
“Any project you do, any work that you do, it’s important to have subject matter experts — people with knowledge of an event,” said Hardy, who is also the founder of the Maryland Recovery Organization Connecting Communities.
“You can’t create a policy or identify what the needs are without having that voice at the table.”
While city officials shone a spotlight on the new board during last week’s swearing-in ceremony, it’s just one part of the strategy the city is implementing to ramp up efforts to combat the overdose crisis.
Scott also announced that Sara Whaley, his senior advisor for public health, would take the helm of the city’s efforts as executive director of overdose response. Whaley was also the program director of the Bloomberg Overdose Prevention Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In addition, Scott named Susan Sherman, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to his Overdose Cabinet. The city is also actively soliciting public input on its community engagement and accountability and transparency plans until March 15.
“Ultimately, I am proud of this board,” Scott said at the press conference. “It’s diverse in background, experience, perspective and profession, but united in their commitment to make Baltimore a leader in our response to the opioid epidemic. The work of this board is going to be absolutely critical in helping to advise and shape the way that the city disperses restitution funds we are receiving and ensuring that it’s being utilized effectively and in a way that centers the needs of all Baltimoreans.”
The new team will work to address a decades-long problem; however, its efforts will come as the city is seeing historic gains in tamping down overdose deaths. Data recently released by the Maryland Department of Health showed Baltimore recorded 680 deaths in 2024, a 35% decrease from the year prior.
The last time Baltimore saw fewer than 700 overdose deaths was in 2016, when 694 deaths were recorded. That year marked the beginning of a massive surge in fatalities, with just 393 overdose deaths recorded in the year prior. Though the numbers are subject to change because they are preliminary, the significance of the decline has prompted newfound optimism among experts.
While officials continue to limit public discourse amid ongoing litigation against opioid distributors, they also hope the windfall of settlement funds they’re already slated to receive will further drive down the numbers. Baltimore is preparing to receive nearly $670 million over the next 15 years from various settlements reached last year.
The ongoing lawsuit against McKesson and Cencora, formerly called AmerisourceBergen, could bring in as much as $5.2 billion on top of that.
Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Lawrence P. Fletcher-Hill is expected to issue a ruling on whether the companies must cover the full costs of the plan in the coming weeks — a decision that city officials say will free them to discuss the overdose crisis more openly and potentially provide an additional infusion of funds for its war chest.
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