For years, Baltimore’s leaders gave overdoses little public attention, even as the death rate swelled to unprecedented levels. But for a few weeks this summer, it seemed that the city would respond to its drug epidemic with new urgency.

The City Council was about to hold four hearings — planned after The New York Times and The Baltimore Banner reported that the overdose rate here was far higher than in any other major American city. And Mayor Brandon Scott had just announced a $45 million legal settlement with a drug manufacturer, raising the possibility of new, well-funded public health efforts to combat the epidemic, which had claimed nearly 6,000 lives here in the past six years.

But hours before the first hearing, as demonstrators prepared to rally outside City Hall, the council president abruptly canceled the session, at the request of Scott’s administration.

The administration said that holding any of the public meetings would jeopardize a lawsuit the city had filed accusing numerous opioid makers and distributors of causing the crisis by flooding Baltimore with pills. City leaders believe the case could result in a transformative amount of money for its overdose response — far more than the $45 million it collected in a settlement with a single company that shipped relatively few drugs to Baltimore.

The decision to cancel the hearings was in keeping with the city’s reluctance in recent months to divulge nearly any details of its overdose prevention efforts, citing the lawsuit, which is scheduled for trial in September. Almost every council member was unwilling to comment on the hearings or on overdoses in the city, including several who had discussed overdoses earlier in the year.

It is not uncommon for governments to limit public statements during litigation, and some lawyers and public health experts said it was understandable to avoid hearings on the eve of a trial. But others said the decision raised questions about Baltimore’s response plan — and how it was addressing shortcomings in the city and state’s efforts to curb the epidemic. Residents have been mostly left in the dark.

“It sets a really dangerous precedent,” said Robin Pollini, a professor at the West Virginia University School of Public Health who began studying overdoses as a student in Baltimore. “You’re saying, ‘We’re not going to talk about a public health problem that’s killing our neighbors.’”

Asked about his approach during a recent news conference, Scott said it was shaped by his “lived experience” of seeing people overdose in his neighborhood, and his desire to protect a potential payout from the lawsuit.

“My responsibility is to do what’s best for the city,” he said.

Overdose deaths in Baltimore have quadrupled since the synthetic opioid fentanyl began to dominate the illegal drug supply a decade ago. The death rate from 2018 to 2022 was nearly double that of any other large city. In May, The Times/Banner found that much of Baltimore’s once-aggressive overdose prevention strategy had stalled, and that city leaders had been preoccupied with other issues as the death rate worsened.

The city’s response was thrown into further turmoil last week by the firing of the health commissioner, Dr. Ihuoma Emenuga, amid an investigation into work she performed for a nonprofit health care group. (Emenuga has not returned requests for comment on her departure.) Dr. Letitia Dzirasa, a deputy mayor and former health commissioner, left in June.

Baltimore filed its lawsuit in 2018, as part of a wave of litigation brought by local and state governments against the pharmaceutical industry over the spread of prescription painkillers. In the years since, most of the opioid lawsuits have moved through the legal system, consolidating and resolving in multibillion-dollar settlements.

But Scott’s administration opted out of the $400 million settlement the rest of Maryland agreed to and carried on with its lawsuit alone, gambling for a larger payout.

Since the Times/Banner series was published, Scott and his aides have falsely suggested that the articles were somehow connected to the opioid companies’ defense.

“I don’t think that it was a coincidence that we saw an article like that while we have active litigation against opioid retailers and manufacturers,” City Administrator Faith Leach told council members at a budget hearing in May, one of the rare moments in recent months that the administration publicly addressed the overdose crisis.

Asked to elaborate at a recent news conference, the mayor said, “I think the residents of Baltimore know when there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Scott’s office declined an interview request. In a statement, his office said the lawsuit was “central” to its response to the opioid epidemic, which the city is actively working to combat while the litigation nears its end. Baltimore is one of few jurisdictions still fighting in court to hold opioid companies accountable and “will do nothing to endanger the outcome of this historic case,” the mayor’s office said.

In June, Scott’s legal bet began to pay off. The drugmaker Allergan agreed to the $45 million settlement, significantly more than the $7 million city officials say Baltimore would have received under the state’s deal.

But $20 million, or nearly 45% of the settlement, went to the city’s outside counsel, the firm Susman Godfrey — an unusually high amount compared with similar cases, according to some lawyers who have handled government litigation. City officials have declined to answer some questions about how that figure was calculated. (Susman Godfrey represents The Times in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.)

In addition, on the day the settlement was announced, $10 million — almost half of the city’s portion — had already been committed to two community groups that provide overdose prevention services. It is unusual for opioid settlement funds to be earmarked at the outset, said Regina LaBelle, director of the Addiction and Public Policy Initiative at Georgetown University.

A month later, the tension between transparency and legal considerations came to a head as Councilman Mark Conway prepared to hold the first public hearing.

Conway, head of the public safety committee, has recently been one of the most vocal advocates for increasing the city’s focus on overdoses. Emails reviewed by The Times/Banner show that Conway negotiated for weeks with the city’s top lawyer, Ebony Thompson, who wanted to limit the hearing to a prepared presentation and written questions that would be answered later in private. Mr. Conway agreed, but asked for closed-door briefings in advance.

Ultimately, Thompson decided even that was too risky. On the afternoon before the first session, she asked the council president, Nick Mosby, to delay any public overdose hearings until the lawsuit was resolved. The next morning, Conway’s hearing was canceled.

In a statement at the time, Conway — who as a committee chairman is allowed to schedule hearings — said he never agreed to postpone the hearing. “The health and lives of Baltimoreans ought to transcend politics, and I regret that did not happen today,” he said. Scott publicly rebuked him, claiming that Conway “cares more about his personal profile” than what is best for Baltimore.

Conway did not speak out about overdoses again until Dr. Emenuga was fired, after which he expressed confidence that the Health Department would recruit a capable new leader and prioritize its opioid response.

Councilwoman Danielle McCray — who had called the other three hearings on overdoses as chairwoman of the health committee — said in a brief statement when the sessions were cancelled that she was “committed to working collaboratively with all stakeholders to address this critical issue.” She did not respond to interview requests. McCray had called two committee meetings on overdoses since 2021, making her one of the most outspoken council members on the topic before the Times/Banner article.

Council President Mosby said in a statement that he knew firsthand how the crisis was “destroying lives, families and communities,” but that he could not comment further “at the advice of the attorneys representing the city.”

Councilman John Bullock, the only other City Council member willing to comment on the hearing’s cancellation, echoed the mayor’s concerns about holding the hearings. “I’m sure there will be more going forward,” he said.

Today, Baltimore’s plans for the epidemic are not clear. The city’s Overdose Prevention Team, charged with creating a citywide strategy, met in June without settling on concrete goals for how to address addiction. Its current plan was written in 2020 and expired in 2023. A Health Department leader said a new draft would be presented this fall.

In interviews, public health and legal experts were divided about the mayor’s decision to clamp down on discussions of overdoses.

Andre Davis, a retired federal judge who served as Baltimore’s top lawyer from 2017 to 2020, said he would have deployed the same strategy were he still advising City Hall, even if “it comes at a cost of transparency.”

“It’s terrible,” Davis said, but “the realities of litigation are the realities of litigation.”

Some disagreed. Cutting off all conversation “seems like a little too high a price to pay,” said Peter Davidson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

“Just from a public health point of view, this seems like craziness,” he said, adding that in California’s wave of opioid litigation, he never saw a jurisdiction take this approach.

Others suggested a middle ground. Liza Vertinsky, a professor at the University of Maryland’s law school, said that while discussing the city’s past response might reveal problems that could hurt its case, that should not stop it from discussing plans for the future.

“If people are looking to the city to respond to people who are needing help today, I don’t know if you can postpone a discussion of that,” she said.