SMART’s Middle Tennessee Substance Use Response Consultant Trevor Henderson provides some key insight into what we are seeing with overdose trends. See below and read the full article for all pertinent information.
“How can anyone be doing drugs when we all know fentanyl is in everything?” We at UT SMART hear this question a lot from community leaders across the state. How is it that people keep risking their lives when we know for a fact that drugs are more lethal than ever?
Sam Quinones, award winning author of Dreamland and The Least of Us, two books that dive deep into the social and cultural realities of the overdose crisis, may have the answer to that question.
SMART’s Program Coordinator Jeremy Kourvelas presented to the Tennessee Public Health Association (TPHA) on best practices relating to using local data to inform decisions, covering:
Please join our regional substance use response consultants for free technical assistance and guidance on matters related to the opioid settlements during their quarterly office hours on August 14 from 9:00-11:00 a.m. Eastern Time, 8:00-10:00 Central Time.
Register here for this free session.
Cities and counties, please note that an important September reporting deadline is right around the corner. Our consultants are here to help!
Jefferson County was awarded Excellence in the Application of the Opioid Litigation Principles by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for using the following evidence-based principles in helping guide the effective spending of their settlement dollars:
SMART's Courtney Collier, our West Tennessee Substance Use Response Consultant, attended the inaugural meeting of the Madison County opioid abatement council and was interviewed by local media station WBBJ. View the article and television clip.
A slight correction, however: Courtney is incorrectly identified as part of UT Martin's staff, when he is, in fact, from the UT Institute for Public Service SMART Initiative.
A cop, a guitar company and a public health analyst walk into a bar…and mount an opioid overdose first aid kit to the wall.
On May 21, the New York Times published an article titled “Has Fentanyl Peaked?” The premise is that the “opioid crisis…may finally be turning around” based on the fact that preliminary data from the CDC shows that drug overdose deaths slightly declined in 2023, now down to 107,543 estimated deaths (or about the equivalent of a plane crash every single week).
"One of his partners in that effort was Trevor Henderson, the former director of Metro Public Health’s Overdose Response Program who is now working as a substance use response consultant with the University of Tennessee’s SMART Initiative—or Substance Misuse and Addiction Resource for Tennessee. A year or so ago, Henderson said he stumbled upon an initiative from Gibson Gives, the charitable arm of Gibson guitars.