As 2024 comes to a close, the United States is seeing a decline in overdose deaths for the first time in five years—an estimated 17% decrease through July 2024, the most recent data available. The drop in overdose deaths from the COVID-era spikes is positive news, but far from a victory.
Overdose deaths are still alarmingly high. Moreover, the positive overall trend isn’t equal across demographics. Indigenous and Black communities are still disproportionately affected by fatal overdose. This underscores the need to further expand lifesaving public health and harm reduction interventions with an emphasis on equity.
As we reflect on our successes and challenges in 2024, we remain focused on what we believe are the most important interventions to save lives: expanding community access to naloxone, ensuring low-barrier access to buprenorphine and methadone across settings, mobilizing communities to expand harm reduction services, and strengthening systemic responses to people who use drugs with health-based support rather than coercion and punishment, across sectors. We go about this work with a constant focus on efforts that will drive equitable and sustainable reductions in fatal overdose by uplifting and supporting people.
Read on to learn about some of our standout projects from the past year!
The Opioid Settlement Principles Resource and Indicators Tool Launch and Opioid Settlement State Guides
In 2023, states and localities began receiving new funds under the landmark $26 billion nationwide settlement reached with pharmaceutical companies for their role in fueling the overdose crisis. Vital Strategies is providing technical assistance and developing resources for policy-makers and community members, to promote the investment of settlement funds in evidence-based strategies.
In collaboration with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other partners, Vital Strategies launched the Opioid Settlement Principles Resource and Indicators (OSPRI) interactive online tool, designed to provide key metrics and performance indicators for evidence-based settlement spending by counties and states.
Our program legal team partnered with Christine Minhee of OpioidSettlementTracker.com to update our popular state-by-state community guides on opioid settlement funds with the latest information about settlement funding for each. The guides were first launched in 2023, and are designed to support and encourage community members to get involved in the decision-making processes that will determine the use of state settlement funds. The update released in December 2024 incorporates the most recent information from all states, and makes the guides easier to navigate in digital formats. The guides have garnered significant media attention, and were recently featured in an article published by The Associated Press.
Drug Checking Programs Launched in New Mexico and Expanded in Pennsylvania and North Carolina
Drug checking programs are a crucial harm reduction intervention that allow people who use drugs to identify unknown substances in the illicit drug supply, including fentanyl and xylazine. This year, Vital worked alongside our New Mexico partners to launch a statewide drug checking program with four regional sites now in operation. These sites allow participants to bring in substances to sites for testing with FTIR mass spectrometers, which provide real-time analysis of substances to inform harm reduction practice and facilitate public health agency responses.
To bolster drug checking efforts in Pennsylvania, Vital Strategies has continued to support the growth of PA Groundhogs’ community-based drug checking work across the state. Since their September 2023 launch, PA Groundhogs has grown their listserv to reach more than 2,000 people in the area with alerts about substances identified through testing. Vital Strategies’ support has also helped this essential organization apply for and secure additional partnerships and grants to help expand their work.
With backing from Vital Strategies, the University of North Carolina’s Opioid Data Lab—which provides mail-in drug checking services to community members free of charge—has expanded its work. The program has increased the use of drug checking services by harm reduction programs led by or serving Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities. The University has conducted on-site assessments and provided trainings at more than 20 community-based programs in North Carolina to help expand the reach of drug checking resources, and is currently developing a coordinated outreach plan for further expansion.
New Jersey Legislation to Support Community-Led Crisis Response Teams
In January 2024, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed the “Seabrook-Washington Community-Led Crisis Response Act,” which establishes community-led crisis response teams as an alternative to police for nonviolent, substance use, mental and behavioral health calls.
In a huge win for this work, the attorney general’s office announced in July that they will disburse $2 million in grant funds for organizations to establish local Community Crisis Response Team Pilot Programs. The Newark Community Street Team and Salvation and Social Justice, key Vital Strategies partners in the state, were selected by the New Jersey Department of Health to receive community responder team funding.
Race Equity Grants to Uplift Community Organizations in our Focus States
To address the surge in overdose deaths in communities of color across our seven partner states, Vital Strategies has awarded over $3.1 million in grants to 24 community-based organizations led by Black, Indigenous and people of color and serving these communities. We now have active race equity grants in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and New Jersey, and expect to award a new round of grantees in North Carolina in early 2025. These community-based organizations are funded to develop and lead events, services, and other locally-relevant strategies for advancing equitable access to harm reduction resources and addressing the racial harms caused by discriminatory enforcement of drug laws.
Supporting Native-Led Organizations
It is similarly critical to support Native-led community organizations taking an Indigenous approach to address the overdose crisis. Vital Strategies awarded a grant to the United Katehnuaka Longhouse (UKL), a Native-led, eastern North Carolina-based nonprofit organization promoting cultural connectedness and revitalization as a way to heal the historical, intergenerational and lifetime traumas that contribute to substance use disorder in Native communities. Through culture classes, talking circles and community socials, UKL provides support to Native people who use drugs, breaks down harmful stigma around drug use, and promotes the health and well-being of Native people across the region.
In November, Dream.org’s “Public Health is Public Safety Campaign” invited Kaya Littleturtle (Tuscarora/Lumbee; United Katehnuaka Longhouse), Philomena Kebec (Bad River Ojibwe; Bad River Tribe), and Skye Hart (Tonawanda Seneca; Vital Strategies) to speak on their monthly campaign call. To learn more about how Native communities are affected by and implementing solutions to the overdose crisis, watch the recording of the webinar “Culture is Medicine: Indigenous Approaches to Addressing the Overdose Crisis.”
Expanding Access to Medications for Opioid Use Disorder (MOUD) in Jails
Vital Strategies collaborates with partners to increase access to medications for opioid use disorder, specifically methadone and buprenorphine, for people who are incarcerated in prisons and jails. In North Carolina, we have worked with independent consultants Elijah Bazemore and Jermaine Russell to advance implementation of medications for opioid use disorder in North Carolina jails. A new component of this project involves the collection and reporting of data to assess availability and access in a uniform manner across counties. Data is extremely limited on jail-based MOUD programs in most every state in the country, and this information helps to describe need, availability, and impact, and focus implementation efforts.
With support from Vital Strategies, the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project (PILP) announced their new storytelling project “Let Us Live” in November. This project amplifies the voices of people directly affected by the overdose crisis and incarceration. By sharing these stories, PILP aims to reduce stigma and discrimination against incarcerated people with opioid use disorder, while also working toward increasing access to medications for opioid use disorder for incarcerated people in Pennsylvania.
PILP’s work over our two-year collaboration has had an enormous impact in the state. Their work requiring jails to disclose details about treatment programs, advocating for individual patients denied treatment, and wielding the threat of litigation against bad actors has been instrumental for expanding the number of jails that now provide buprenorphine programs. PILP’s recently released 2024 report revealed that the availability of buprenorphine and methadone for opioid use disorder in jails has increased considerably over the past two years: 84% of jails in the Commonwealth now offer induction and/or continuation of treatment for recently incarcerated people with opioid use disorder. Moreover, naltrexone-only programs in the jails declined from 26% to just 6% between 2022 and 2024.
State-led Online Naloxone Portals Now Operate in Five of our Seven Focus States
Since the launch of the Bloomberg Overdose Prevention Initiative in 2018, Vital Strategies has worked with state partners in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New Mexico and New Jersey to help state officials launch or expand online naloxone portals. These online portals offer information for accessing naloxone in-person and online, as well as comprehensive educational overdose prevention materials. To date, these five states have altogether dispensed more than 1.8 million doses to groups for local distribution. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services recently credited the implementation of its Naloxone Direct portal for a substantial impact on reducing overdose deaths in the state, a decline that was nearly five times larger than the national average between 2021 and 2023.
In Kentucky, Vital Strategies partnered with Greener Media, a production company, to design a four-minute animated overdose response training video. The training, produced in both English and Spanish, aims to empower bystanders to respond to an overdose with confidence and compassion. Viewers can learn how to identify the signs of an overdose, how to use naloxone, and how to perform proper rescue breathing. Public health and community organizations are welcome to download these videos for free use in support of their own educational and outreach efforts! for free use in support of their own educational and outreach efforts!
“Keep NM Alive” Media Campaign in Bernalillo County, New Mexico
Bernalillo County worked with Vital Strategies to expand the “Keep NM Alive” campaign with messaging featuring New Mexicans, to highlight community-based drug checking and naloxone, and destigmatize families who have lost a loved one to overdose. The county’s digital presence now includes a series of videos featuring real and compelling stories from local community members. In addition to the website launch, the campaign generated millions of impressions through key media placements with this content, including showing on more than 50 screens at three major movie theaters, 10 bus shelter locations where ads were displayed in English and Spanish, and billboard placement along a major highway.
Brown University’s Newly Released Site OPCinfo.org
Researchers at the People, Place and Health Collective at the Brown University School of Public Health created an online resource called “opcinfo.org” to bring up-to-date, evidence-based information about overdose prevention centers to the public. The comprehensive site features a robust database of more than 150 published research papers with accessible plain language summaries of each, a recorded virtual tour of an overdose prevention center, and a library of photos and videos that media outlets can access for free to share objective and non-stigmatizing images illustrating services for people who use drugs.
Jon Cherry and Louisville Public Radio’s “Redefining Hospitality” Photojournalism Project
Photographer Jon Cherry and Louisville Public Radio, with support from Vital Strategies, published “Redefining Hospitality,” an expansive photojournalism project highlighting the experiences of people who are homeless in the Louisville area. The project featured several people who are residents at the Arthur Street Hotel, an organization that provides low barrier temporary housing access as an alternative to the punitive measures unhoused people are often subjected to, such as fines, encampment clearances, and arrests. In addition to the written feature, Cherry produced “Redefining Home,” a photo essay that features interviews with current residents at Arthur Street Hotel. A condensed version of the project was also published by The Guardian.
Through the ongoing efforts of the Overdose Prevention Program at Vital Strategies, we believe we are making important contributions towards ending overdose in the many local and state jurisdictions where we work, and for the country overall. These are just some examples of our projects and our many amazing partners across states and communities. We look forward to continuing our positive impact in 2025.
Learn more at https://www.vitalstrategies.org/programs/overdose-prevention/