January 6, 2026

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced on December 23, 2025, the allocation of $47.84 million from New Jersey’s Opioid Recovery and Remediation Fund to support critical programs, connect New Jerseyans with tools to minimize overdoses and other harms of substance use, and support residents’ treatment and recovery. The new investments will allow the state to expand its treatment infrastructure, remove barriers to care, and enhance services that improve long-term stability and health for residents.

New Jersey has now allocated more than $324 million in state-level opioid settlement resources toward prevention, treatment, recovery, and community supports, the announcement stated. The new $47.84 million allocation includes a mix of expansions to evidence-based programs, capital investments to serve more patients, family health-focused innovative programs, and strategic planning initiatives:

• Bridge Access to Community-Based Substance Use Treatment: $15 million to provide access to treatment for uninsured individuals.
• Capital Investments for Substance Use Treatment Providers: $8 million for critical facility repairs, modernization, expansion, and mobile unit investments to improve treatment access.
• Housing Continuum Expansion: $10.5 million over three years to establish new housing and wraparound services for medically complex individuals in Essex County, including 20 housing slots, case management, provider certification and training, and drop-in center capacity building.
• Keeping Families Together Expansion: $4.86 million over three years to support 30 to 35 additional families and address rising housing costs in this nationally recognized Housing First supportive housing model.
• Perinatal Centers of Excellence: $6.2 million over two years to launch a pilot center offering integrated maternity, behavioral health, and wraparound services to address substance use disorder, the leading cause of pregnancy-associated deaths in New Jersey.
• Monitoring and Evaluation of State-Level Opioid Settlement Programs: $3 million over three years to measure program outcomes and ensure accountability and impact of settlement-funded programs.
• Study on Administrative Barriers to Care: $250,000 to identify policy changes that can improve access to care and advance a public health-focused, harm-reduction strategy.

The recommendations were advanced by the Opioid Recovery and Remediation Advisory Council, which was established in 2022 and charged with advising the administration on the effective, equitable use of opioid settlement dollars.

“In New Jersey, statistics have shown that more than 40% of families involved with the child welfare system lack safe and stable housing. Our Keeping Families Together program has been a critical component in providing supportive housing and wraparound services for more than 600 families navigating substance use and addiction recovery, family safety concerns, and who, without this evidence-based intervention, would have likely been subjected to family separation and deeper end involvement in the child protective service system,” said Department of Children and Families Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer. “Substance use disorders remain the leading cause of pregnancy-associated deaths in New Jersey, and that’s not a statistic we can accept,” said Acting Health Commissioner Jeff Brown.

Strategic investments of settlement funds have transformed New Jersey’s opioid response infrastructure: enabling services in every county among New Jersey’s 55 and counting Harm Reduction Centers, adding mobile units and remote referral tools to bring care closer to communities, providing supportive housing for New Jerseyans in recovery, expanding operations at 22 Community Peer Recovery Centers, reducing impacts of new threats in New Jersey’s drug supply, and more.