Notice Number: NOT-DA-24-057
Deadline: June 05, 2025
Background
The US continues to be in the midst of an overdose crisis, with overdose fatalities increasing from fewer than 17,000 deaths in 1999 to approximately 100,000 deaths nearly 25 years later, peaking in 2022 with almost 108,000 deaths. Recognizing the growing burden of overdose deaths, federal, state, and local jurisdictions have implemented a multitude of diverse efforts to address the overdose crisis. Despite these efforts, overdose deaths have largely continued to increase, and there are substantially more overdose deaths now than there were in 2017, when the opioid crisis was first declared a public health emergency.
Nonetheless, there have been periods of improvement in the crisis, including a decrease in the number of overdose deaths nationally from 2017 to 2018, and again from 2022 to 2023 following dramatic increases in overdose deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, provisional data indicate that overdose deaths have continued to decrease into 2024. Moreover, there has been variation in drug overdose death rates and trends across jurisdictions and populations over the course of the overdose epidemic.
The purpose of this NOSI is to solicit research to identify specific state and local policies, programs, and strategies that have contributed to population level reductions in overdose deaths, with a goal of identifying successful approaches used by jurisdictions that could be applied more broadly to other jurisdictions to reduce the burden of overdose deaths across the United States.
Priority research areas include, but are not limited to:
- Determining the extent to which specific policies, programs, or strategies or combinations of policies, programs, and strategies have contributed to reductions in overdose deaths
- Identifying the key elements of policies, programs, or strategies that have contributed to reductions in overdose deaths
- Identifying effects and differential effects of specific policies, programs, or strategies in reducing overdose deaths for specific populations, settings, or drugs
- Conducting economic evaluations of overdose prevention policies, programs, or strategies with a focus on overdoses prevented
- Developing tools to support jurisdictions in allocating resources to prevent overdose deaths
For more information, please see the opportunity webpage.