Smashing orange cones

And millions more for NC

Got some good news that’s been a long time coming.

We - along with AGs from all 50 states and 6 U.S. territories - have now reached the final settlement with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family for their role in starting the opioid epidemic.

This goes back to the 1990s. Purdue Pharma - owned by the Sackler family - lied to a bunch of doctors by saying they had invented a new opioid pill that wasn’t addictive.

The pill was OxyContin, it was highly addictive, and it sparked the prescription pill crisis, which became the heroin crisis, which has become the fentanyl crisis.

There’s no erasing the damage they did, but this settlement is major accountability.

It’s another $150m for North Carolina, which brings us up to $1.6b for opioid-related settlements for our state.

Huge credit to my predecessor, Gov. Stein, who made this a top priority, as well as the team at NCDOJ who spent years fighting for this. They delivered.

Smashing orange cones

Last week, I got behind the wheel of a police vehicle and was given a simple instruction:

Don’t hit the orange cones.

I was at the ribbon-cutting for the new driving track at our Justice Academy - the premier course in NC for teaching law enforcement advanced driving skills.

I’ve got a video below, but before you watch it, just give me some grace. It’s a hard course. The washout rate is high, even among seasoned officers.

So did I smash some cones? Yeah, absolutely. But eventually I figured it out and did okay.

And this is why I’m grateful to our Justice Academy instructors - they’re training officers to hit far fewer cones than I did.

You can watch the video here:

The Lighthouse Fund

This might surprise you, but here’s the deal:

As things stand, millions of North Carolinians aren’t going to hear from me again until the next election.

Why?

Because newsletters like this, social media, and local news just don’t reach as many folks as you might think.

That’s not ideal. I’d love to share with them the fights we’re taking on, like this video from last week. I think they’d really appreciate it.

But we can’t run TV ads this early. Can’t afford it.

However, we can run a monthly digital message (on YouTube, Instagram, etc.) to roughly a million people in NC.

That’d cost about $9,500.

So we’re starting The Lighthouse Fund.

Once a month, we’ll deliver a clear beacon to a large group of independent voters in the form of a targeted digital message.

The goal is to maintain a baseline level of awareness so that when campaign season gears up, we aren’t starting from scratch with those voters.

Here’s the math: If we can keep in touch with roughly 50% of independent voters for the next three years for under 2% of what we spent for our last campaign, that should produce a strong return-on-investment in a state where elections often come down to less than 1% of the vote.

To my knowledge, this hasn’t been tried before - at least in NC. But with the number of voters you can now reach online, I think it’s time for a new approach.

The most effective way to support this is a small, monthly donation - but of course, we’d also appreciate a one-time contribution. You can do either one here (ActBlue) or here (non-ActBlue).

Thanks for standing with me.

Jeff Jackson