Baltimore plans to ease financial burden on families of fatal overdose victims

The city of Baltimore wants to help families dealing with the aftermath of a fatal overdose.

Losing someone to a sudden fatal drug overdose can be “an incredibly heavy burden to carry” financially, as well as emotionally, said Kelly Gill, cofounder and executive director of a Baltimore-based nonprofit that helps families devastated by substance use disorder.

After laying their loved ones to rest, families can be left with thousands of dollars in funeral expenses. And the bills continue to pile up if they also need help with childcare and mental health counseling, she said.

“There needs to be an open conversation about how we fill in the gaps with families who have lost someone to overdose,” said Gill, who helped start Love In The Trenches after her son died in 2019 after a yearslong opioid addiction.

Last week, city leaders approved a budget that included $1.15 million to create a new family support fund. The money comes from nearly $260 million the city won after suing opioid manufacturers and distributors for their roles in the city’s historic overdose crisis.

In all, Baltimore plans to spend about $41 million from the city’s opioid restitution fund this upcoming year, with chunks funding city agencies on the frontlines of the overdose crisis, including the fire and health departments and the Mayor’s Office of Homeless Services.

About $18 million will go to organizations that provide harm reduction, treatment and other services to the community, according to budget documents.

For the city’s new family support fund, the next step is to consult with members of an advisory board and the public before setting eligibility requirements, according to Sara Whaley, the city’s executive director of overdose response.

Details about the program — including who could apply for financial assistance and what would be covered — have not yet been finalized, she said.

Opioid companies have paid out billions of dollars in settlements to state and local governments nationwide. While tracking that spending for her previous job at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Whaley saw an innovative financial support idea coming out of Boston that would eventually become the model for Baltimore’s program.

Last year, Boston officials launched what is believed to be the first such program of its kind in the country, and the “impact has been profound,” the city’s public health commissioner, Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, said in an interview.

So far, the fund has paid more than $225,000 to at least 67 families, according to Brendan Little, executive director and cofounder of a program that helps Boston distribute its opioid restitution funds to families.

Payments to Boston families are currently capped at $7,500. The program does not have any income requirements, but a team works to verify that someone died of an overdose before directly paying for services on behalf of the person’s family, Little said.

The program has funded funerals, daycare, mental health counseling services and grief camps for children, he said.

“In my opinion it belongs to these families because it’s blood money,” said Little.

In 2025, according to the Maryland Department of Health, about 600 people in Baltimore died from drug overdoses. Though the number of fatal overdoses in the city fell by more than 40% since 2023, Baltimore continued to have the highest rate of overdose death of any large city in the country.

Last summer, the city held community listening sessions at schools and churches in some of Baltimore’s hardest-hit neighborhoods. Again and again, people asked for help for the families directly affected, Whaley said.

“When someone loses their life to an overdose, there’s that ripple effect,” she said. “It’s not just that individual, but it ripples out into the family and into the community in a lot of different ways.”