Opioid Use Disorder in Fairfax County

Across Fairfax County and Virginia, law enforcement and health care professionals continue to report a shocking number of deaths due to heroin and opioid overdoses. The statistics are startling.

Progress is Being Made

Over 30 activities are currently underway or in development across five priority areas: education, prevention, and collaboration; early intervention and treatment; enforcement and criminal justice; data and monitoring; and harm reduction. Significant achievements include:

• The Fairfax-Falls Church Community Services Board expanded medication-assisted treatment and has significantly reduced the wait for residential treatment.
• The Sheriff’s Office’s jail-based MAT program in the Adult Detention Center launched in July 2020 and is seeing early success with former inmates staying engaged and successfully connecting in unprecedented numbers to CSB’s Addiction Medicine Clinic.
• Over 3,700 individuals have received REVIVE training, a free course on how to administer opioid reversal medication.
• The Peer Outreach Response Team (PORT) has partnered with the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue and Police Departments to connect individuals encountered by public safety for non-fatal overdoses to PORT for recovery action planning, discussion of treatment and support group options, REVIVE training, and more. PORT is also available to County residents.
• Drug disposal boxes have been added to 1 all eight Fairfax County Police District stations and also are available at some pharmacies. Find a location using this searchable map.
• The Fairfax Prevention Coalition was established to empower the community to understand, prevent and reduce substance misuse.
• An Opioid Policy and Data Framework (OPDF) was developed to support collaboration and compliant data sharing among the participating agencies. The OPDF project, funded by a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) grant awarded in 2018, was successfully completed January 31, 2022.