Policymakers and community leaders play an important role in addressing opioids in our communities. This page highlights the most recently added resources specifically targeting elected and appointed government officials and staff members, members of the law enforcement community and first responders, and employees and volunteers of organizations. These resources, identified with orange tiles, include policy roadmaps, implementation guides, toolkits, education materials, sample legislation and other materials that can help you design and implement effective programs to prevent and address the consequences of opioid crisis.
If you’d like to submit materials for inclusion consideration or suggest a future featured topic, please visit CLOUD’s call for submissions page.
A comprehensive report on strategies to use data to inform policies to address the opioid crisis from the Rand Corporation. The report includes a review of national opioid policy priorities, reviews existing research and commonly used data sources to support these policy priorities, categorizes and describes existing data sources, and describes challenges to using data to address opioid-related issues along with strategies to address these challenges.
A comprehensive report on increasing access to evidence-based treatments for substance use disorder in the criminal justice and child welfare systems from researchers at the Addiction & Public Policy Initiative of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law Center. The report specifically addresses increasing access to medications to treat opioid use disorder (MOUD) in jails and prisons, in treatment court settings, and in the child welfare system. The report reviews programs in multiple states and summarizes legal, legislative and fiscal strategies to implement and manage evidence-based, public-health focused interventions in these settings.
Public health professionals frequently mention the 1998 tobacco settlement as an example of a lost opportunity to ensure that the settlement funds were used for public health purposes including tobacco use prevention and cessation programs. In many states, the settlement funds were used to fill state budget gaps and for other non-tobacco-related purposes and some public health officials are concerned that any funds recovered through opioid-related lawsuits may experience the same fate.
This 2019 systematic review assesses the evidence for the effectiveness of behavioral health interventions as part of a medication-assisted treatment (MAT) regimen for opioid use disorder (OUD). The report also evaluates clinical practice guideline recommendations for behavioral health treatments as a part of MAT and describes 3 service delivery models that implement low-threshold MAT programs in Missouri, Virginia and in the Veterans Health Administration.
This report examines how 6 state Medicaid agencies have used data to develop strategies to address the opioid crisis. The report describes how states use data from medical and pharmacy claims, prescription drug monitoring projects (PDMPS), health information exchanges (HIE) and admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) databases to identify providers and patients with problematic opioid-related behaviors and what they do to address these behaviors. Case studies of initiatives in South Dakota, Minnesota and Tennessee are featured.
This 6 minute video explains the National Institute of Health’s Strong African American Families Program (SAAF). SAAF was developed by Dr. Gene Brody and his team at the University of Georgia, is a prevention program targeted at 10- to 14-year-old rural African American youths and their families.
In the 1990s, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration provided grants to create family-centered, residential substance use disorder treatment programs that allowed children to reside with their parents. This 2004 case study looks at the Families in Transitions program
This research study summary looks at Project Nurture, an integrated prenatal and postpartum care program for pregnant mothers with substance use disorder and their infants.
The Bexar County, Texas Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) collaborative works to improve outcomes for mothers and infants affected by substance use disorder.
This 2007 report from a symposium on family-centered substance use disorder treatment (SUD) sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) describes options for supporting families during SUD treatment along the continuum of care, including residential treatment programs that allow children to reside with their mothers during treatment.