This is a report from SAMHSA that highlights 10 collaborative faith-based partnerships and outlines the steps taken by these teams in establishing a foundation for sustained strategic partnerships among community and interfaith leaders to support prevention, treatment, and recovery needs in their communities.

This is an academic paper that provides an overview of the trajectory of the opioid crisis through the lens of a structural and social determinants of health framework. Having an understanding of the root causes of the opioid crisis, such as upstream structural factors, can inform comprehensive interventions to a complex public health emergency. 

This employer toolkit, developed by the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Business Partnership, uses a five-step approach to prevent and address opioid use disorder and other substance use disorders within the workplace. The toolkit can be customized to fit an employer's needs. 

This is a presentation by Dr. Sharon Levy of Boston Children’s Hospital that gives an overview of the impact of opioid misuse on adolescents, including an emphasis on youth brain development and the risk factors that lead to opioid misuse. 

A toolkit by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) provides local, state, and national resources for local health departments to better address the opioid crisis. The toolkit is divided into sections: monitoring and surveillance, prevention, harm reduction, linkage to care, and stakeholders/partnerships. 

This is a paper that provides a preliminary evaluation of using peer outreach workers to identify and link people with opioid use disorder (OUD) to methadone treatment in a high-risk community in Chicago.

The results are promising as 88 active users with OUD were identified, 70 showed up for a linkage meeting to initiate treatment, and 70% of the people who initiated methadone treatment were still receiving methadone 60 days after intake. 

This is a website, operated by the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry and funded by SAMHSA, that provides education and training at a local level to provide evidence-based practices in the prevention, treatment, and recovery of opioid use disorders. Technical assistance is available at no cost to all communities. 

This is report recognizing that community pharmacists are uniquely poised to engage in efforts to reduce opioid misuse and opioid related overdose. It provides guidance to pharmacist on screening for potential opioid misuse, dispensing medications for opioid use disorder, and providing access to naloxone.

This document from four of the longest-tenured and well-respected organizations in the addiction sphere outlines three major strategic priorities for addressing the opioid crisis with potential opioid settlement money. These include:

1) Enhancing public education to correct long-held misconceptions and to create informed demand for more effective policies and interventions

2) Implementing evidence-based, community-wide prevention and early intervention to reduce the incidence of opioid use disorder (OUD) and overdose

3) Modernizing OUD treatment by integrating it with mainstream healthcare and increase access to evidence-based addiction support and treatment services

This website was developed by the National Association of Counties and empowers local leaders to invest resources from opioid settlements into effective treatment, recovery, prevention, and other public health practices. 

This is a report from Pew Charitable Trusts that outlines the necessity of Opioid Treatment Programs (OTPs) across the United States. The report discusses how these OTPs are currently impeded by current federal and state regulations and how this is also inhibiting access to opioid use disorder treatment. The report suggests specific recommendations to stakeholders that will increase and expand OTPs implementation.

This is a peer-reviewed paper in Nature providing an overview of opioid use disorder (OUD) and is written by a group comprised of many leading experts in the field. The paper discusses the epidemiology of OUD, especially as it relates to risk factors and burden. Next, the neuroscience and pathophysiology of OUD are discussed. The last half of the paper provides the evidence on strategies for prevention, early intervention, and treatment for OUD.