This report describes model criteria for certifying peer support workers to ensure their competence in providing substance and/or mental health peer support services. Such criteria include providing evidence of understanding of lived experience with substances, training in core competencies, formal education in relevant disciplines, and having supervised work experience. 

This is a report from the American Medical Association and Manatt Health that examines the response to the opioid crisis in four different states. Within this document, state-level efforts in six key areas were analyzed to identify best practices and provide a road map for all states to follow to mount a comprehensive response to the opioid crisis. 

This is a guiding document from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) that provides standard operating procedures to help address the operational challenges of implementing, managing, evaluating, and monitoring a syringe service program (SSP). 

This is a presentation by several collaborating organizations that describes the community response to the opioid crisis addressing upstream, midstream, and downstream interventions, such as cautious opioid prescribing, medications for opioid use disorder, and overdose prevention, respectively. 

NEXT Distro is a harm reduction organization that has created an online and mail-based opioid overdose response training platform that facilitates access to naloxone through the mail. In addition, this website has state-level information on harm reduction services and has been essential to naloxone distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This interactive dashboard from the federal government gives nonfatal drug overdose data at the state and county level reported by emergency medical services, which is more comprehensive data that includes some nonfatal overdoses where people do not go to an emergency department. 

This is a website that has a searchable database of syringe service programs (SSP) across the United States and provides support for new and existing SSPs. 

This report outlines potential strategies to increase patient access to nasal naloxone in emergency rooms and other treatment settings, thus serving as a guide for administrators, healthcare providers, and non-medical providers seeking to create reimbursable streams for naloxone. The aim is to allow patients and community members to receive this life-saving medication in their treatment setting as quickly as possible, decreasing barriers to overdose prevention.  

This surveillance dashboard from the ONDCP allows users to track non-fatal opioid overdoses in near real-time on both the county and state levels

This report by the Health Policy Institute of Ohio finds that for the first time since the opioid crisis began, Ohio’s monthly overdose deaths started to decline markedly in the second half of 2017. Ohio’s strong policy focus on overdose reversal has likely contributed to this good news. 

The information provided in this document points to the fact that evidence-based harm reduction is an underutilized tool, and that Ohio can do more to incorporate harm reduction strategies as part of a comprehensive, person-centered response to the addiction crisis.

A  website providing a report and other resources by the Health Policy Institute of Ohio on overdose reversal and other forms of harm reduction. It provides an addiction policy inventory and scorecard focused on the state of Ohio that gauges how well harm reduction services are being delivered to a community.  

This is an academic paper that describes an overdose education and naloxone distribution intervention to train opioid users and those who will come into frequent contact with opioid users, such as first responders, who, in turn, train others. There is also a focus on outreach to high-risk populations in this paper.