Paper Title
AN ANALYSIS OF FEDERALISM AND STATE LEGISLATIVE STRATEGY IN THE CONTEXT OF THE AMERICAN OPIOID EPIDEMIC

Abstract
The opioid epidemic caused markedly harmful addiction related outcomes throughout the United States. As a result of over prescription, an abundance of class action litigation against corporate manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of opioids ensued to hold corporate actors accountable for knowing promotion of addictive substances. States served as plaintiffs in many of these class action suits to recover costs related to citizen harm and mortalities. As a result of the corresponding state class action litigation, a federal settlement fund was created to assist individual states in funding and implementing policy initiatives to rectify the opioid epidemic within state jurisdictions. Consequently, states enacted legislation to govern and direct disbursement of these federal settlement funds. This paper utilizes data from the National Academy for State Health Policy to present a qualitative coding scheme to categorize state legislative content according to which entity within a given state has binding authority pertaining to spending of state allocated opioid federal settlement funds. This qualitative coding scheme is primed for use in future analysis to determine whether certain categorizations of legislative content, based on which state entity has control of settlement funds, facilitates effective policy outcomes that practically enable meaningful public health improvements. Keywords - Federalism, Opioid Epidemic, Federal Settlement, Public Health