Journalists’ Roundtable: Opioid settlements, abortion law insights

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another edition of the Journalists’ Roundtable. To discuss this week’s topics, we were joined by Wayne Schutsky of KJZZ and Laurie Roberts of “The Arizona Republic” and azcentral.com.

This week’s topics included:

• Opioid settlement funds
• Mayes opinion on abortion law
• Shelby Busch threatens “lynching”
• Brewer said she’d vote for Trump
• Coyotes owner walking away

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes doesn’t have the power to make certain decisions by law, Schutsky said.

“In order to balance the budget, which had a huge deficit in it, the state ended up pulling from this opioid settlement with a bunch of pharmaceutical settlements that was supposed to address the effects of the opioid crisis. They used it to backfill the Department of Corrections budget, which they say is known to be helping people affected by this opioid crisis. The Attorney General said, ‘Wait a second, don’t do that. I’m the one who administers these funds. This could violate the terms of the settlement,’” said Schutsky. 

Roberts discussed the Attorney General and abortion laws before the Idaho abortion ruling. 

“A couple of weeks ago, a couple of the legislators asked her to put out an advisory opinion, worried that if a woman would go in for an abortion needed to save her life, they wanted some sort of opinion on whether or not women can get an emergency abortion in the state of even a medical emergency,” said Roberts. 

Mayes alerted a variety of healthcare facilities that if a woman comes in 20 weeks pregnant and needs an abortion, they won’t be sued. 

“She specified that doesn’t mean that after the fact, if other doctors look at that opinion, think you were wrong; as long as you’re acting in good faith when you made that decision,” said Schutsky.