This is a joint report by the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties that is targeted to local leaders as well as state and federal officials, and which provides recommendations for solutions on the entire continuum of care.

This is an academic paper that provides challenges for how primary care providers in rural areas will respond to the intersection of opioid use disorder and COVID-19, and recommendations are made to meet challenges presented by the coronavirus.

Framing the opioid crisis from a public health perspective requires considering the interaction of multiple determinants, including structural factors (eg, poverty and racism), the inadequate management of pain, and poor access to addiction treatment and harm-reduction services (eg, syringe services). 

This novel ecological framework for harmful opioid use provides multiple recommendations to improve public health and clinical practice, including improved data collection to guide resource allocation, steps to increase safer prescribing, stigma-reduction campaigns, increased spending on harm reduction and treatment, criminal justice policy reform, and regulatory changes related to controlled substances.

This is an academic paper that provides a scoping review of opioid policy interventions that the federal and state governments as well as organizations have used to address the opioid crisis, some of which include prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMP), pain clinic laws, laws restricting opioid prescribing, health insurance strategies, educational interventions, and naloxone distribution. The evidence for each intervention is assessed.  

This is an academic paper that describes lessons learned from the implementation of a system that initiates buprenorphine in the emergency department and provides a warm handoff to community providers for continuation of medication treatment. There is focus on information technology facilitators and barriers. A better-designed system will increase retention in treatment. 

This is the abstract of an academic paper that identifies and describes all of the post-overdose responses across the United States. These interventions are delivered in various ways, such as through the emergency department, home visits, mobile outreach, and law enforcement diversion. 

This is a peer-reviewed article on an observational intervention study of Project Lazarus, which is a community-based response to overdose deaths implemented in 74 of 100 North Carolina counties.

This is a systematic review to highlight the state of knowledge around rural medication treatment for opioid use disorder, identify consumer- and provider-focused treatment barriers, and discuss rural-specific implications. Its findings consistently identify a lack of medication providers and rural-specific implementation challenges.

This review also highlights a lack of rural-focused studies involving consumer participants, treatment outcomes, or barriers impacting underserved populations. There is a need for innovative treatment delivery for opioid use disorder in rural communities and interventions targeting provider attitudes.

This is an academic paper that provides an overview of employer-led interventions aimed at addressing drug use among employees. Overall, 27 studies in the peer-reviewed literature are highlighted, with interventions addressing opioid use and misuse after workplace injuries or accidents the most commonly reported to be effective. 

This report describes barriers to accessing methadone created by four types of federal regulations. It explains how regulators have the legal authority to remove these barriers which would increase the availability of methadone for the treatment of opioid use disorder. 

A toolkit for provider organizations working to improve opioid safety. The toolkit summarizes best practices and contains links to resources and tools that a provider can adapt in building or testing changes for an organization and its patients.

This report is a product of the O'Neil Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law Center. It provides information on current laws, policies, and court actions in all 50 states related to access to medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) in correctional facilities in the U.S as of April 2021, including methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Where available, this survey also includes examples of programs that are county- or facility-specific.