The Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention was created in 2013 to establish a coordinated, statewide response to the opioid crisis. Its mission is to reduce the misuse of prescription drugs through improvements in education, public outreach, research, safe disposal, and treatment. 

The Consortium is part of the Colorado Center for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention in the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus, and includes more than 500 individual and organization representatives, including the Colorado Medical Society, state and federal agencies, numerous health care professional organizations, public health officials, and nonprofit organizations.

The Consortium works with more than a dozen local and regional coalitions to support their community-based work (providing technical assistance and grant writing assistance through external relations strategists) and has ten action-oriented workgroups to determine and execute the Consortium’s strategy. 

One of the roles of the Consortium is to educate and inform stakeholders and the general public on the evolution of and potential solutions to the opioid crisis in Colorado. The Consortium does this by:

• giving presentations across the state. Examples can be found here and here 
• creating a comprehensive dashboard to provide communities and officials with up-to-date data on the opioid crisis
• creating a website to educate the general public on the safe use, storage, and disposal of prescription opioids
• developing a facilitators guide to accompany an educational module highlighting people with lived experience, designed for individuals and organizations to raise awareness of the opioid crisis and decrease stigma
• collaborating to produce a blueprint to help decision makers at municipal, county, and state levels allocate potential opioid settlement dollars received

The Consortium has expanded to take on polysubstance and psychostimulant use. An overview of Colorado's response to the opioid crisis, which highlights the consortium, can be found here.