Using Implementation Interventions and Peer Recovery Support to Improve Opioid Treatment Outcomes in Community Supervision

Project SummaryCOVID-19 threatens to exacerbate the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States, but thepandemic has also provided an opportunity to experiment with changes in how opioid treatmentservices are delivered around the country. The current pandemic has resulted in a flurry ofunprecedented policy measures, and it is crucial to understand the impact that rapid changes inlaw, regulation, and policy are having on individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD), particularlythose involved with the criminal justice system.Deploying law to support, rather than hinder access to treatment requires evidence of whichlegal levers help and which hurt, and a clear mapping of the state of the law in every applicablejurisdiction. Legal epidemiology - the scientific study and deployment of law as a factor in thecause, distribution, and prevention of disease and injury in a population - provides an innovativeframework to understanding the positive, negative, and incidental effects of these policychanges on population health.The research team will use legal epidemiology and policy surveillance methods to collect andsystematically code laws, regulations, executive orders, Medicaid waivers, and other opioid-related policies relevant to the criminal justice system during the COVID-19 pandemic. The legaldata will be published and freely available for download for all users, including JCOIN networkmembers, to evaluate the impact of these evolving legal measures on health outcomes overtime.1