Lead: America’s Opioid Ecosystem: How Leveraging System Interactions Can Help Curb Addiction, Overdose, and Other Harms

Lead Story:

America's Opioid Ecosystem: How Leveraging System Interactions Can Help Curb Addiction, Overdose, and Other Harms 

RAND Corporation

This ebook highlights that although opioids play an outsized role in US drug problems, they also play a critically important role in medicine. Thus, they deserve special attention. Illegally manufactured opioids are involved in a majority of US drug overdoses. Efforts to address problems related to opioids are insufficient and sometimes contradictory.  Components of the opioid ecosystem include substance use disorder treatment, harm reduction, medical care, the criminal legal system, illegal supply and supply control, first responders, the child welfare system, income support and homeless services, employment, and education. Leveraging the interactions of the opioid ecosystem can reduce addiction, overdose, suffering, and other harms.

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