Mayor Brandon Scott and his office over the last year have done plenty to tout the enormous funds the city has secured through its legal battle against opioid distributors, which culminated on Tuesday in a jury verdict against McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, the two companies that declined to settle with the city. We’re all for holding this mayoral administration accountable and pointing out its missteps, but it’s also constructive to recognize when it achieves real success — and in this case, City Hall has earned the right to give itself all the pats on the back it wants.

The city had its critics over the last few years as it opted out of global settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors in order to pursue separate litigation against the companies over their role in Baltimore’s opioid epidemic. Baltimore City declined to take a piece of the hundreds of millions of dollars the drug companies agreed to pay out to the state of Maryland — which the city’s law office said would amount to “just a few million dollars a year” to Baltimore over 18 years — making a gamble that its own lawyers could secure greater reparations.

That bet paid off. Before the city’s trial even began in September, nearly all of the defendants, including pharmaceutical giants Walgreens, Johnson & Johnson and Cardinal Health, reached settlements with Baltimore totaling more than $402.5 million. With Tuesday’s jury verdict against McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, the companies have been ordered to pay $274 million, bringing Baltimore’s total restitution to more than $668.5 million, the mayor’s office said, though some portion of that will go toward paying the city’s attorneys.

And Baltimore may still see more funds come its way, with an “abatement” phase of the trial due to begin in December in which the city will ask for up to $11 billion more from the two companies.

This enormous windfall puts the city in the strongest position to prevent further harm to its citizens from the opioid crisis after years in which the defendants pumped potent opioid pills such as Oxycodone into the city by the hundreds of millions, making Baltimore one of the deadliest cities in the country for overdoses. The decision to opt out of the statewide settlement may prove momentous and, if the funds are disbursed wisely to reliable prevention and treatment programs, could positively impact the lives of Baltimoreans for decades to come.

It’s clear the mayor is getting some good legal advice. That’s in part by necessity — Baltimore itself regularly faces myriad lawsuits seeking millions of dollars from the city and can ill afford not to have a highly capable law department at hand.

We praise the mayor’s office for its handling of this case so effusively in part because what it will need a healthy heaping of going forward is accountability and scrutiny. The heaps of cash Baltimore has won represent a big win but just as big a responsibility to see that it doesn’t go to waste.

The $668.5 million Baltimore has secured is a lot of money, to be sure, but that kind of money can go quickly and without care if it’s not in the hands of capable and thoughtful experts who are sincerely looking to spend it where it will have the most benefit.

It’s also important to note that while Baltimore has seen a slight decline in overdose deaths since the number peaked at 1,079 in 2021, Maryland Department of Health data shows, they still are far higher than they were just a decade ago. This case may have been about securing damages for opioid distributors’ past wrongs, but the rapid pace at which Baltimoreans still die from overdoses even as the city’s population declines shows that this is a crisis that has not been even partially resolved.

That means the mayor faces the daunting task of coming up with solutions that will find lasting success where the city’s response to the opioid epidemic in recent years has yet to make a dramatic impact. There’s no reason yet to doubt that the mayor knows what he’s doing — his August executive order establishes a trust fund to “sustain the impact of these funds for at least 15 years,” something that will be necessary if these funds are to have a lasting effect in mitigating the devastation of the opioid epidemic. But let’s take nothing for granted and hold Mayor Scott and Baltimore’s future leadership to their duty of responsibly allocating these funds now and years down the line.

The city has proven that it knows how to benefit from some top-class lawyering. We’ll be even more impressed if it finds as much success through the programs it’s about to fund.