Our Work
Medical Advances, Policy Changes Spur Increased Testing for Deadly Infectious Disease
Colorado Struggles to Address Mental Health and Substance Use: A Colorado Health Access Survey Issue Brief
Statewide Needs Assessment of Primary Prevention for Substance Abuse (SNAPS) Final Report
More Coloradans have been dying of drug overdoses each year for nearly a decade. It’s a health crisis that’s been increasingly in the public eye, but the newest data are still startling: Some 912 people died of an overdose in 2016 – a state record. Preliminary data from 2017 suggest that more than 950 died of an overdose last year.
Colorado Reaches a Record High for Overdose Fatalities. Again.
Three pillars of a policy response and where the Colorado legislature’s actions match up to the evidence
A Report for the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing Conducted by CHI
Between 2012 and early 2017, I was part of a policy team at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that helped to advise then-Secretary Sylvia Burwell on a wide range of health policy topics, including the best available evidence to combat the opioid epidemic.
It was an important task. Drug overdose deaths claimed more than 52,000 lives in the U.S. in 2015 alone, with more than 33,000 from opioids. To put that in perspective, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic in 1995, the disease claimed 51,000 lives.
President Donald Trump today declared opioid abuse a nationwide public health emergency and said his administration will take aggressive steps to address the epidemic’s causes and effects.
“It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction,” he said in a speech at the White House. “I am directing all executive agencies to use every appropriate emergency authority to fight the opioid crisis.”
Three of four new cases in Colorado are among the 20- to 29-year-old age group, CHI analysis shows.