Narration, as voiced 233 lines · select a line to jump there
Act I 0:41
There is a kind of public money in Ohio that is not like the rest of it. It is not tax revenue. Nobody voted a levy for it. It did not arrive by fee, or fine, or federal formula. It exists for one reason. Pharmaceutical companies were sued over their part in an epidemic of addiction and overdose, and they paid to make the lawsuits stop. That is what opioid settlement money is. It is damages. Every dollar of it is a price somebody put on what happened to somebody else. Ashtabula County is one of the poorer counties in Ohio, and it took the epidemic the way poor counties take everything — first, hardest, and longest. The source material behind this investigation describes the years when overdose deaths here were coming in, in its phrase, like a tidal wave. That is a description, not a count — and the count exists. Ashtabula County has it. But nothing in this episode depends on the count. It depends on one legal fact. Settlement money is not general revenue. It arrives with a string attached. The agreements governing it require that it be spent on something called opioid remediation — treatment, prevention, recovery. The string is the entire point. This money was supposed to go back toward the people it was taken from. So there is a question, and it is the only question this episode asks. In Ashtabula County, where did it go? Six episodes in, you already know how to answer a question like that here. You go and read the paperwork. And this is the one place in this county where the paperwork does not start at the county at all. It starts with a statewide agreement, and a private foundation. Nobody in Ashtabula County elected that foundation, and no episode of this series has yet named it. This county's share never passes through its hands. It goes straight to the commissioners.
Act II 3:04
The foundation is called the OneOhio Recovery Foundation. It is a private nonprofit, created to hand out fifty-five percent of Ohio's share of the settlements. That is not an accusation; that is its legal form. National settlements land, Ohio's portion is carved up, and thirty percent of it goes around the foundation entirely — paid straight to local governments, Ashtabula County among them. The memorandum of understanding that governs the money is where the string is tied: funds are for opioid remediation. Now look at that phrase like a lawyer, because somebody did. Remediation is not a defined list of purchases. It is a category, and categories have edges. A detox bed is plainly remediation. A dose of naloxone in a first responder's kit is plainly remediation. Prevention work in a school is remediation. Then the edge starts to move. Is a drug investigator remediation? Is a vehicle he drives? Is the software he searches? You can make the argument. Ashtabula County made it, in writing, in 2022: its resolution calls the drug task force 'helping with drug abatement.' Somebody has to decide where that edge falls. For this county's share, the body standing at that edge is not a foundation. It is the three commissioners. Understand what that changes. A county board can be voted out. Its meetings have minutes, its resolutions have numbers, and its paperwork is yours by law even when you have to fight for it. A private foundation is a different kind of object. It has a board, not an electorate. Which brings us to what the county's own paper shows, stated at exactly the strength it has. How much opioid settlement money Ashtabula County has received, and where it has gone, is written down: one numbered fund, two thousand and four, and payment after payment into it voted in by numbered resolution. Janssen, Walgreens, Kroger, CVS, Teva — each company's cheque, by name, to the cent. And whatever OneOhio does or does not publish about itself, it is not the body that holds the answer for this county. Ashtabula County holds it. Ashtabula County receipts money into numbered funds, and spends it against numbered accounts, and those numbers are on a page in a county office right now. Hold that. It is going to come back, and when it does it will be the whole argument.
Act III 6:00
Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of April, 2026. Two minutes past one in the afternoon. A work session of the Ashtabula County Board of Commissioners. The minutes name everybody in the room. All three commissioners — Casey Kozlowski, Kathryn Whittington, JP Ducro the Fourth. Two staff: the County Administrator, Janet Discher, and Lisa Hawkins. One reporter, Warren Dillaway. And one member of the public. His name was Fred Trautlein. One. In a county of ninety-seven thousand people. The session ran thirty-six minutes, and in those thirty-six minutes the board handled a print-services renewal, a pet food cupboard, a mowing contract, a liquor licence transfer, a summer youth programme, and the funding of this county's drug enforcement apparatus. Detective Brett Grabman presented. He is a detective on CEAAC — the Crime Enforcement Agency of Ashtabula County — and he is married to April Grabman, the county prosecutor, whose office prosecutes his cases. Keep both offices in mind. This episode's money reaches both: the task force's payroll, and an assistant prosecutor's salary in her office. He presented a CEAAC award of one hundred and forty thousand, five hundred and nineteen dollars and three cents. Read what the county's own minutes say it buys. A full-time detective. A community outreach and public information officer. Eleven thousand and something toward the salary of a second detective. And five hundred dollars for supplies. Eleven thousand and something. That is not a paraphrase. The county's record of its own money gives the figure as eleven thousand, and then three letter x's, sitting in the minutes where a number is supposed to be. The award does not cover the employer's retirement contributions or the Medicare match. Those the county pays itself, out of its own money, on top. It begins on the first of May, and runs twelve months. Then two more, presented in the same breath. About twenty thousand dollars from JAG for equipment. About eleven thousand from Drug Law for CEAAC operations. Three grants, one presenter, one afternoon — a little over a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, all of it for the enforcement of drug law in Ashtabula County. Now read the shopping list back to yourself, because it is worth hearing as a list. A detective. A press officer. Part of another detective. Five hundred dollars of supplies. Equipment. Operations. Nothing on that list treats anybody. That is not a criticism of the men on it. It is a description of what the money is for, taken from the county's own page, and it is the reason the next thing in these minutes matters so much.
Act IV 9:18
The minutes have a second half. Under the heading of miscellaneous items, further down the same page, the board discussed this. Opioid settlement, from six remnant defendants. New revenue. Contacted by legal counsel, estimated percentage. Approximately just under thirty-two thousand dollars. Signing this means we want to join the lawsuit. We will approve the actual settlement when it is paid in. That is the entire entry. So in one thirty-six minute session, in one room, in front of one member of the public, this board handled money for the enforcement of drug law and money paid out because of drug deaths — and its own minutes file them apart. Different origins. Different mechanics. Different paragraphs, on different halves of the same page. One is applied for. The other is sued for. The minutes file them apart. The county did not. For months this investigation carried a claim it could not prove: that a resolution numbered 2025-552 moved opioid settlement money into the task force's payroll. It was written up in the analysis pages as established fact. It was priced in the units that make you feel it — detox beds, medication-assisted treatment slots, recovery housing, naloxone kits. And it could not be found. Not the executed text, not the vote, not the number in any index searched. For months, the gravest claim in this investigation was the one with nothing under it. It exists. Resolution Number 2025-552. December 16th, 2025. A resolution transferring funds from the 2004 Opioid Settlement Fund and designating said funds to the Crime Enforcement Agency of Ashtabula County — CEAAC — Fund 2250. Read the recitals, because they do the work themselves. Whereas, Ashtabula County is a Local Government that has adopted and approved the OneOhio Memorandum of Understanding, which establishes a mechanism to disburse settlement proceeds from the opioid litigation into Ohio's communities to help abate the opioid crisis. Whereas, pursuant to the terms of the Memorandum, thirty percent of the settlement proceeds will be paid directly to local governments, including Ashtabula County, for approved purposes as delineated by the Memorandum. And then the operative clause. Whereas, the Board of Commissioners hereby designates three hundred four thousand, eight hundred sixty-one dollars from fund two thousand four to fund twenty-two fifty, for the Crime Enforcement Agency of Ashtabula County, for the salary of two and a half CEAAC officers. Two funds. One number. Money that exists because people in this county died of overdoses, moved by resolution into the salaries of two and a half narcotics officers. Every element the investigation could not source is on the face of that page. The OneOhio origin. Both fund numbers. The amount. The destination. The purpose. It is not a grant application and it is not a news account. It is the instrument, numbered and passed. Be precise about what it establishes, because precision is what makes it impossible to wave away. The county's own audited books describe the fund this money came from as 'restricted for public health and welfare programs.' The county's own resolution describes the task force it went to as 'helping with drug abatement.' Both descriptions are the county's. Set them side by side. None of it was hidden. The resolution is public, it is numbered, and it passed in open session, three votes to none. What it establishes is simpler, and no one has to characterise it. The county decided that the best available use of three hundred and four thousand dollars of opioid-settlement money was to pay the wages of the officers who enforce drug law. The same day, by the very next resolution, it moved seventy-five thousand more into the county's general fund — for the salary of an assistant prosecutor 'prosecuting drug crimes.' That was a choice, made on the sixteenth of December, 2025: Kathryn Whittington moved the first, Casey Kozlowski moved the second, and JP Ducro the Fourth voted with them on both. And one more thing, which belongs in this episode because it is a finding about this investigation and not about the county. A claim that could not be verified for months was carried as though it were proven. It was true — and the county had been doing the same thing since 2022. That is not a vindication. It is a warning. It was carried without its instrument, which means for all those months it was indistinguishable from a claim that was false — and this series has retired dozens that were. There is a second number in the enforcement stream, and it is worth being exact about, because it is the kind of thing that gets misread as a scandal and is not one. A January 2025 news account of a presentation to these same commissioners put a CEAAC figure at one hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars — a full-time investigator, a coordinator's salary, a vehicle, and software, running May 2025 to April 2026. The county's own work-session record, sixteen months later, puts what that year paid at about a hundred and forty thousand. Those two numbers are not in conflict. The first is what was applied for. The second is what was paid. And the county's own minutes settle it in a single clause: this year's award, they record, is about five hundred dollars more than last year's. Say that plainly, because nothing is gained by leaving a false discrepancy lying around. Nobody in this county misstated a grant figure. An application is one document and an award is another. What has not been located is the executed award itself — the page that would show what the ask contained and what the payment finally bought. That is a missing record. It is not a lie. And the record that actually matters in this episode is not missing at all. Ashtabula County receipts every dollar it receives into a numbered fund and spends it against a numbered account. That is not optional; it is how a county is required to keep books. In 2023 the opioid fund sent out two hundred and ninety-three thousand, one hundred and seventy dollars — and the task force's fund took in exactly that. That page exists. It is in the county's own audited annual report — and the next year's shows it again: seventy-three thousand, two hundred and thirty-one dollars out, the same figure in. It has been public all along. The gravest claim anyone has made about this county's money is not unproven. The county settled it in its own books — three years running.
Act V 17:16
Go back to the invoice and look at what is being bought. Five hundred dollars of supplies. Everything else is people. A detective's salary, an outreach officer's salary, part of a second detective's salary, and a retirement contribution the county tops up itself. This money is not equipment. It is payroll. That matters beyond one task force, because payroll is the largest recurring line in any county budget. Not a purchase, not a contract, not a one-off. The permanent baseline cost of the government existing at all. So ask who pays for it. The three commissioners do — the same three you have watched all series. For 2026 they set this task force's budget at just over half a million dollars, three hundred and fifty-two thousand of it payroll. Most of what this series has shown you needed an event to switch it on — an invoice, a purchase, a vote. This one comes round every year. Those three set that budget every year — and in 2023, three of every four dollars that came into the task force's fund were opioid settlement money.
Act VI 18:44
Now put two lists side by side. This part does not even need the resolution, or the line it draws between two accounts. It needs only the record as it already stands. Now look for treatment on that county paper. In the three years its audited books cover, the county's settlement fund paid nothing to treatment. In 2024 the settlement foundation's grants to this region came to two and a quarter million dollars. Treatment got one of them — a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to Crossroads Health, for young people. The morning after the work session you have just heard, the commissioners held a public Coffee with Commissioners in the Andover library. A resident asked about funding for the Silver Sneakers programme. The minutes record the answer: participants now have to pay, because the funding could not be secured. Against that, on the previous afternoon, the drug task force's award came with something extra written into the minutes beside it. The programme is going away — but the new Governor may have something similar, and advocacy has begun. Advocacy has begun. For the enforcement side, before the money is even gone. So here is the ledger, and every dollar in it comes off county paper. Paid: a full-time detective. Paid: a public information officer for the drug task force. Paid: part of a second detective. Paid: five hundred dollars of supplies. Lined up: about twenty thousand of equipment, about eleven thousand of operations. All of it presented in open session and minuted — the big award to the cent and on that day's agenda, two more lined up behind it — and already being lobbied for a year ahead. Paid to treatment, out of the county's own settlement fund: nothing. And the settlement money is in the task force's payroll: the county's own books move it into the task force's fund in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and its 2026 budget sends it again. The county published that trace itself, in numbered resolutions and audited books. Now read the ledger against the county's own description of that fund. Its audited books call it 'restricted for public health and welfare programs.' In the three years those books cover, every dollar that left it went to public safety — almost all of it into the task force's fund — and not one line of it to treatment. Read the ledger again. Nothing on it treats anybody. The detective is still paid. The press officer is still paid. The retirement match is still topped up out of county money. Treatment still is not on it. The transfer this episode is named for is a movement between two numbered funds — two thousand and four to twenty-two fifty — passed three votes to none. The priority is not in question. It is on the county's own paper, in the county's own minutes, in the county's own hand, thirty-six minutes long and witnessed by one member of the public. Money exists in Ohio because people in counties like this one died of what was manufactured, marketed and prescribed to them. In Ashtabula County, the apparatus that arrests the survivors is paid out of that very money, and already lobbying for next year. The treatment money that reached this region came through a private foundation. The county's own settlement money went to the task force. No page is missing. The fund numbers are in the county's own resolutions, and the transfers are in its own audited books. Nobody in Ashtabula County has to assume the worst. The county wrote it down, and its clerk certified it. You have met the people in this county's control points one at a time — two of the pairs so far: the bus operator and his wife, the detective and the prosecutor. Now put all of them in one room. That is Episode Eight.