To understand the impact of the $2 billion opioid lawsuit settlement that has brought a flow of cash into Lehigh County since 2022, look to the floor of center city Allentown’s busiest laundromat.
Tuesday is free laundry day at Family Wash Day on Linden Street, with nonprofits on hand offering counseling while a St. Luke’s Hospital mobile unit provides medical services to the city’s homeless and at-risk community. The weekly event is coordinated by the Loads of Blessings ministry.
Many of the people who stream into the laundromat carrying baskets and rolling suitcases full of dirty clothes bring their kids. And those children are not always well supervised.
“The first thing that stood out to me when I started coming here was the children,” said Sheniqua Mitchell, outreach manager at Bloom For Women, a faith-based anti-human-trafficking organization. “They were sleeping on the floor under the tables. Some of the parents were using drugs and the kids were left alone, where they could be a target for sex offenders.”
Mitchell, a survivor of child sex trafficking, said she walked out into the parking lot behind the laundromat one Tuesday and saw a mother negotiating with a drug dealer with her young daughter sitting on the ground between them.
“I knew I was seeing trafficking happening because of what happened to me,” she said. “So I intervened. Right after that we started the children’s program here.”
Kids taking part in the BRACE student education program (Be Ready, Alert, Courageous and Educated) meet with counselors at the laundromat each Tuesday to play games, talk about their feelings and enjoy snacks, all while learning safety skills to reduce their risk of being abducted and trafficked. The program is funded through a $135,000 opioid settlement grant to Bloom from the Lehigh County district attorney’s office.
Since taking office in January 2024, Lehigh County District Attorney Gavin Holihan has approved nearly $1.6 million in opioid settlement grants to local nonprofits, including $1 million toward renovations at Treatment Trends, an in-patient drug treatment rehabilitation facility on Sixth Street in Allentown, and $347,000 to support medication assisted treatment for opioid-addicted inmates at Lehigh County Jail.
Westminster Homes of the СŷƵ, which provides sober living houses for people in addiction recovery, also received more than $104,850 from the district attorney’s office to create and fund the first and only drug and alcohol recovery house for mothers with children in the Valley. The grant money also covers the monthly fees for the families to live there.
All the money Holihan has passed along to the agencies comes from a series of lawsuits filed in 2021 against opioid manufacturers and distributors, mostly by municipal governments. Lehigh County was one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuits.
The suits were settled in 2022, with the drug makers agreeing to pay $2.2 billion statewide over 18 years to the plaintiffs, including Lehigh County and the Lehigh County district attorney’s office. Lehigh County expects to receive approximately $17.6 million over 18 years.
The settlements are intended to compensate government entities for the cost of dealing with the opioid epidemic.
How СŷƵ counties are spending millions for the opioid crisis
The payments are overseen by a board of trustees and come with significant restrictions that require that the money be spent exclusively on “opioid remediation efforts,” such as treatment, prevention, research and support for incarcerated people battling addiction.
“Almost everything on the list is outside the normal functions of a prosecutor’s office,” Holihan said.
The money can’t be used to pay prosecutors’ salaries or to buy equipment, such as armored trucks or guns. District attorneys’ offices that violate these rules can be required to pay back the money or have future payments limited.
For an office tasked primarily with prosecuting criminals, spending the opioid settlement money can present a challenge. Holihan learned this firsthand three months into the job when he discovered a $1 million grant from the year before had a looming deadline, giving him five months to spend it under the strict guidelines or it would be lost.
With help from the county’s Drug and Alcohol Department and the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, Holihan was able to transfer the $1 million to a grant previously awarded to Treatment Trends Inc.
John Dillensnyder, executive director of Treatment Trends, said the money has allowed his organization to restart a program that had been suspended, at a time of great need. Although opioid deaths have decreased, in large part to the distribution of the overdose-reversal naloxone, many people fighting addiction need to stay at an in-patient facility. Dillensnyder said he hopes to have the renovated facility open by the end of the year.
“It was a tremendous asset to us and will allow us to provide a safe space of hope and healing to the people we serve,” Dillensnyder said. “Personally, it meant the world to me.”
To help smooth the process of distributing future funds, Holihan has added two community outreach positions to his staff, a move that was approved by the county commissioners in mid-October.
Even without that help, Holihan is more qualified than many district attorneys to decide how to use the money. He spent nearly his entire career on the defense side, representing people charged with crimes stemming from addiction, both as a private attorney and assistant public defender, before being hired by former District Attorney Jim Martin as first assistant in 2023. He was elected to the top post later that same year.
“These are people to me,” he said. “It also helps that I understand the cycles of addiction, what addiction does to people and how it contributes to crime. What I’ve tried to do within the restrictions of what we can do with opioid money is to address spending that money in a way that is likely to reduce crime.”
Holihan calls his philosophy “sowing what we reap,” and he’s tried to further that mission with other financial gifts.
In February, the Lehigh County district attorney’s office donated $142,000 in drug forfeiture funds to Allentown School District for family engagement, peer mentoring and elementary athletics programs. While the law gives district attorneys discretion on how forfeiture funds are spent, the donation was a break from tradition, since the proceeds from seized property are usually used to pay for law enforcement costs such as police overtime.
Holihan said he received “minor pushback” from some in the law enforcement community over the donation, but he believes it’s an appropriate use of the money.
Drug dealers get their money from addicts, he said, who steal from their neighbors and deprive their kids of things like decent shoes and trips with their friends. Law enforcement then takes the money from the drug dealer through forfeiture.
“That money comes out of the community. We have reaped that money from the community, and there’s no reason we can’t sow it back to the community. It’s perfectly permissible by the law that controls forfeiture money,” he said.
If crime reduction is the goal of the drug forfeiture law, Holihan added, programs that help young people grow into successful adults offer some of the best opportunities to reduce crime in the long term.
“It also sends a message to the community that we’re not just here to arrest and prosecute you. We’d like you to not commit crime in the first place. You can say those things, or you can invest in those things,” he said.
At the Family Wash Day laundromat, it’s clear that the opioid settlement grant money is benefiting young people.
Allentown resident April Yehle brings her children Sharon, 12, and Matthew, 16, to the BRACE program every Tuesday. The kids enjoy the activities, which include breathing exercises to manage stress and lessons about how to seek help from adults when needed. Yehle said she’s seen her daughter’s confidence boosted.
“She’s learned a lot about how to protect herself, and she likes spending time with the other kids,” she said.
Emmanuel James of Allentown brings his 5-year-old son, Seven. On a recent Tuesday, Seven was molding Play-Doh shapes with BRACE counselor Rachel Ellison while his father waited for their laundry to finish.
“We feel welcome here, and he gets to meet kids from his community,” James said.
Mitchell said that 80 children have taken part in BRACE since it launched in February 2024. The opioid settlement money has allowed them to expand the program and she’s hoping to be able to buy a used school bus or other large vehicle to move the kids to a quieter location each Tuesday.
“We’re grateful to be here, but this is not ideal for kids. There’s people fighting in the parking lot some days, and we’ve had people overdose right there,” she said, pointing to the Allentown Cemetery, which is right next to the laundromat.
“I would love to gather the children up off the floor and take them away from all this.”
Laurie Mason Schroeder is a freelance writer.
