When the Colorado Health Institute released the Colorado Opioid Crisis Response Blueprint in 2019, we sought to equip Colorado communities with a practical guide for thinking about how to invest anticipated opioid settlement dollars. What CHI didn’t expect was that the Blueprint would eventually inform decision-making far beyond Colorado.
CHI’s opioid blueprint document summarized the magnitude of the opioid crisis, outlined the state and local infrastructure already in place, and presented 20 possible investment options organized into four domains: prevention, treatment and recovery, harm reduction, and criminal justice. CHI provided this guidance to help state and local decision-makers plan strategically before settlements arrived, preventing fragmented spending and building consensus among diverse stakeholders with competing priorities.
To understand how experts would prioritize these options, CHI surveyed professionals from public health, clinical care, law enforcement, and government. Respondents allocated a hypothetical $100 million in settlement funding. Their responses highlighted a clear theme: treatment and recovery services were the highest priority, followed by prevention and criminal justice, and finally harm reduction. The report then used these findings to lay out potential pathways for community investment.
The Blueprint was not a prescriptive plan. Instead, it offered communities a way to think about the spectrum of strategies available and the tradeoffs involved while acknowledging the need for local tailoring based on workforce capacity, cost-effectiveness, sustainability, and desired outcomes.
