Building Effective Public Health and Public Safety Collaborations to Prevent Opioid Overdose at the Local, State, and Federal Levels

This chapter describes the public health role in the Overdose Response Strategy (ORS), a public health/public safety collaboration between the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The mission of the ORS is to reduce opioid overdose incidents by developing and sharing information about heroin, fentanyl, and other opioids across state and federal agencies. In addition, the ORS supports states in implementing evidence-based strategies to combat the opioid overdose epidemic, especially where those strategies are informed by local data. Teams comprising one drug intelligence officer and one public health analyst work in each of the 24 ORS states. Challenges and opportunities of public health and law enforcement collaboration are described.