News & Milestones

Research, policy analysis, and announcements from the founding team of Essentrify — advancing opioid settlement compliance and community resilience.

New Paper

The Evidence Trap

What Opioid Settlement Recipients Need to Know About Evidence-Based Practice Before It’s Too Late

Why the interventions most likely to change outcomes are the hardest to prove — and what that means for $57 billion in settlement spending. Second in a series on the evidentiary foundations of opioid abatement.

Douglas E. Dormer · Daniel K. Cheruiyot, MD · George A. Adepoju, MD · Daniel A. Adepoju, MD

Read the full paper →

Series: Evidentiary Foundations of Opioid Abatement

A sequence of papers examining the evidence standards, measurement challenges, and structural constraints that will determine whether the opioid settlement succeeds or fails.

  1. Paper II · Current

    The Evidence Trap: What Opioid Settlement Recipients Need to Know About Evidence-Based Practice Before It’s Too Late

    Argues that “fund evidence-based practices” is widely misunderstood in a way that leads recipients back toward the tobacco settlement’s central failure. Distinguishes evidence-based practice from evidence-based treatment, shows that the factors carrying the most weight in recovery are the hardest to prove, and identifies the binding constraint as bandwidth rather than will or ability.

    Douglas E. Dormer · Daniel K. Cheruiyot, MD · George A. Adepoju, MD · Daniel A. Adepoju, MD

  2. Paper I

    The $57 Billion Wager We Cannot Afford to Lose

    The settlement will be judged not by how the money was spent but by whether anyone can prove it mattered. This paper makes the case that without a measurement infrastructure built into abatement from day one, the opioid settlement risks repeating the tobacco settlement’s defining failure — spending the money without evidence that it worked.

    Douglas E. Dormer

Foundations

Earlier research that laid the groundwork for this series.

Press Release