New York City Just Made Cash-for-Syringes Permanent. The Money Comes From an Opioid Settlement Meant to Fight Addiction.
Buried in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) first city budget is a $3 million line that outlived its own pilot label. The Community Syringe Redemption Program pays enrolled New Yorkers 20 cents for every used syringe they turn in, up to $10 a day, at eight sites across four boroughs — and the money comes from the more than $189 million New York City has collected from opioid manufacturers and distributors it once sued.
The city calls it litter control. Health officials say it has pulled more than 2.3 million syringes off Bronx sidewalks and Brooklyn stoops since the pilot quietly began in March 2025, while paying out about $292,000 to more than 1,700 participants in its first year. Critics call it something else: a subsidy for continued drug use, funded by legal settlement money that was supposed to help pay for getting people off drugs in the first place.
Queens Council Member Joann Ariola (R), the program’s loudest critic, put it plainly: opioid settlement funds “should all be going toward addiction treatment services — not for paying users to turn in their needles for cash.” The $3 million line didn’t get a vote of its own — it surfaced in budget documents the administration submitted to the City Council on June 30, 2026, hours before lawmakers adopted the entire $125.8 billion budget, 45-6.
- $189 million — opioid settlement dollars NYC has collected from manufacturers and distributors it sued, as of the FY2027 budget cycle — Fox News, NY AG
- 20 cents — paid per used syringe returned, capped at 50 syringes a day ($10) — NYC Health Department program page
- 2.3 million — used syringes the program says it has collected since its March 2025 launch — Fox News, citing DOHMH
- $11.1 million — total value of the city's contract with Addiction Response Resources, the nonprofit that runs the program, through the end of 2027 — Fox News, Gothamist
- 45-6 — the City Council vote that adopted the $125.8 billion FY2027 budget containing the program's new permanent line — amNewYork, City & State New York
The program traces back to Local Law 124 of 2022, sponsored by then-Deputy Speaker Diana Ayala (D) and 23 co-sponsors. Ayala’s pitch at the time was blunt: “The intent of the bill is to get those folks that are using on our streets and open spaces to bring back the dirty needle… as opposed to discarding them improperly.” The Council approved it in November 2022, and then-Mayor Eric Adams (D) let it become law by returning it unsigned that December — neither vetoing it nor putting his name on it.
It then sat as an unwritten mandate for more than a year. The Health Department didn’t propose its implementing rule until February 2024, adopted it that May, and made it effective that June. Enrollment in the “Community Syringe Redemption Program” finally opened in March 2025, run under contract by Addiction Response Resources, a nonprofit that operates a nearly identical buyback model in Boston and, since August 2025, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. New York’s version runs eight redemption sites — five in the Bronx, one each in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.
The money funding the buyback isn’t tax revenue — it’s litigation proceeds. New York City sued opioid manufacturers and distributors starting in 2018; NY Attorney General Letitia James (D) filed a parallel state suit in 2019. Those cases, plus dozens of others nationwide, produced settlements with McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, Janssen/Johnson & Johnson, and others, capped by James’s January 2025 announcement of a $7.4 billion nationwide settlement with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family — of which roughly $48 million is New York City’s specific share, part of up to $250 million allocated statewide. By a January 2025 Council oversight hearing, the city had received $154.3 million in cumulative settlement funds; by the FY2027 budget cycle that figure had grown past $189 million, with the city projecting $500–550 million total by around 2040.
Some of the settlement pool has gone toward conventional treatment. In May 2026, Mamdani stood at Phoenix House, a Brooklyn addiction treatment center, to announce $12 million in opioid settlement funds for seven peer-led recovery nonprofits, flanked by Council Members Chi Ossé (D-Brooklyn) and Tiffany Cabán (D-Queens).
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is at Phoenix House, an addiction treatment center in Brooklyn, to announce the city is investing $12 million dollars of opioid settlement money into supporting seven recovery-centric nonprofits. He's joined by CMs Chi Ossè and Tiffany Cabán.
That announcement complicates the simplest version of the critics’ case — not all the settlement money is going to cash payments. But it also sharpens the comparison: $12 million went to treatment nonprofits in one announcement, while $3 million was written permanently into the budget for a program critics say pays people to keep using, out of a settlement pool the city itself has not fully itemized in public reporting.
Ariola has objected since the beginning. At the original 2022 committee hearing, she asked: “And who’s paying the $0.20 per needle? Where is that money coming from? I think the taxpayers are paying for enough!” Her position hasn’t moved now that the funding source is confirmed as opioid settlement money rather than general tax revenue — she argues it “is putting money in the pockets of addicts” instead of paying for the treatment beds the settlements were meant to help fund.
“[Opioid settlement funds] should all be going toward addiction treatment services — not for paying users to turn in their needles for cash.”
Council Member Joann Ariola (R-Queens, District 32)
The skepticism isn’t only Republican. Bronx Council Member Oswald Feliz (D) credits the program with measurably reducing needle litter in his district, but warned the city “should not recklessly create conditions that can threaten the safety of vulnerable communities” by expanding it without matching investment elsewhere. Queens Council Member Vickie Paladino (R) voted for the original 2022 pilot but was skeptical of its scale from the start: “A shot glass over Niagara Falls doesn’t work.” A Health Department spokesperson, Rachel Vick, defends the program in narrower terms, saying it lets residents “live in a community free of syringe litter.” One enrolled participant, 43-year-old Tamia Wright, told Fox News the payments are “definitely a side hustle” and said she planned to spend her proceeds on “weed… and cigarettes” — the exact framing Ariola and Feliz say the city should be worried about.
The city’s own Sanitation Department data shows a real drop in street litter: workers collected 26,229 discarded needles citywide so far in 2026, down from 64,560 over the same period in 2025. Whether that decline is due to the redemption program, broader shifts in drug use, or some combination, is not something the city’s public reporting isolates — but it is the strongest evidence supporters have for the program’s stated purpose.
New York is locking in this funding at the same moment the federal government is moving in the opposite direction on harm reduction, generally. A July 2025 Trump executive order barred federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration grants from funding “so-called harm reduction or safe consumption efforts.” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island) has gone further, targeting the city’s separate supervised-injection sites specifically — reintroducing a “Defund Heroin Injection Centers Act” and calling on the Justice Department to shut them down. The syringe-redemption program is a different model from a supervised injection site — it doesn’t supervise drug use on-site — but it sits inside the same federal-versus-local argument over what “harm reduction” should be allowed to fund.
In January, our administration inherited a $12 billion budget deficit — a fiscal crisis greater than the Great Recession. Today I am proud to announce that our balanced budget has cleared the final step and passed the New York City Council. We balanced the budget by taxing…
Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) — made the $3 million CSRP line permanent in his first city budget, adopted June 30, 2026.
Council Member Joann Ariola (R-Queens, District 32) — leading critic since 2022; says settlement funds belong in treatment, not cash payments.
Council Member Oswald Feliz (D-Bronx, District 15) — credits reduced litter but warns against scaling recklessly.
Diana Ayala (D) — sponsored the original 2022 bill as then-Deputy Speaker; now running for State Assembly.
NY Attorney General Letitia James (D) — secured the $7.4 billion Purdue Pharma/Sackler settlement funding NYC's share.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island) — pushing the opposite policy direction federally on harm-reduction funding.
A pilot the City Council mandated in 2022 and didn’t fully implement until 2025 is now a permanent $3 million budget line, funded by opioid settlement money the city collected from the same industry that helped cause the crisis. The city has real litter-reduction numbers to point to, and it did direct $12 million of that same settlement pool to treatment nonprofits this year. But the loudest critics — a Republican council member and, more cautiously, a Democratic one — argue the program pays people to keep using rather than to stop, funded by money that was supposed to help them stop. Nobody voted on the $3 million line by itself; it arrived, and passed, inside a $125.8 billion budget.
