Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention

The City of St. Joseph Health Department is a recipient of funding from the State of Missouri Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) grant. Through support from the OD2A grant, we coordinate the Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention coalition. 

The Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention (ASAP) coalition is a highly collaborative group of professionals and volunteers from multiple sectors of the community working together to best address substance use disorder (SUD). Meetings are held on the second Thursday of the month at 12pm and typically last an hour. They are held at the St. Joseph Health Department, 904 South 10th Street and can also be attended by Zoom. Contact us through email to request the link. We welcome anyone who wants to attend! 

The mission of the Buchanan County Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention is to utilize current and relevant prevention and education information; to create a community with a collaborative approach to treatment and recovery; and to reduce the stigma and harm of substance use and disease of addiction. 

We focus on addressing all facets of substance use disorder (SUD) from promotion of services, prevention and education, as well as treatment and recovery resources. We review locally collected data from emergency services including Buchanan County Emergency Medical Response and Mosaic Life Care Emergency Department; data from the Buchanan County Medical Examiner’s Office; law enforcement; and from Mosaic Life Care’s Women’s Health department. Gathering and analyzing data helps us determine how service providers can improve and identify gaps in our approach.

Achievements to date:

The St. Joseph Health Department hosted an Opioid Summit in November of 2017, which served as a catalyst to start to the coalition. The summit concluded with a survey requesting continued involvement, leading to the formation of the Buchanan County Opioid Task Force, which eventually transitioned into the Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention coalition. One of the first impacts from the development of this task force was bringing treatment and recovery providers together resulting in increased collaboration to best serve those with SUD. At the direction of the task force, a second Opioid Summit was held in 2019. 

One of our most successful endeavors has been to provide naloxone at no charge to anyone who asks for it. We began blanketing the community with naloxone in 2023 and immediately saw a 33% decrease in overdose deaths that same year. Overdose deaths claimed 42 lives in 2022; 28 lost in 2023; 28 in 2024. 

Naloxone is provided at no charge to agencies through the Addiction Science Team at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health, University of Missouri-St. Louis. Using this resource, several people within our community became trained to demonstrate how to use naloxone effectively to save a life, and multiple agencies now offer this life-saving intervention to the public. 

The health department and ASAP coalition have hosted multiple events around annual national and international awareness days including Black Balloon Day, National Fentanyl Awareness Day, and International Overdose Awareness Day. 

Through the coalition and with support from the OD2A grant, in-person Peer Support Specialist training has been provided at no charge to attendees, and we continue to provide funds to cover the registration fee for virtual Peer Support Specialist training. Missouri Recovery Support Specialist training was also provided in 2023 and twice in 2024. 

The coalition has run community education campaigns promoting “Don’t Run, Call 911” (Good Samaritan Law) using transit (bus) ads, billboards, and print materials; “Know the Risks” (You are at Risk of Opioid Addictions after 5 Days of Use) in print material; CDC “RX Awareness” campaign using tv, cable, and movie theatre ads; and promotion of events. We also host a Facebook page.