With more than 30 million people in the U.S. across every walk of life misusing opioids, the CDC has classified this growing problem as an epidemic. Opioid misuse touches every community, and nearly every family is affected. The first step for millions of Americans is to search online for help.
Unfortunately, current online support isn’t effectively meeting this growing need. This is why we created the not-for-profit Opioid Center of Support.
A Note from our Founder
My name is Vera Tkachuk. I lost my son, Justin, to a Fentanyl overdose. It is a pain no mother should have to endure. Tragically, I am not alone. Families across America are living through the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history. We created the Opioid Center of Support for them. I personally have experienced how challenging it is find the best resources and get the right support. The Internet, often the first place we turn, is full of misinformation on opioid misuse. Resources are scattered across different sites in different formats. The goal of this site is to assist you in helping your loved one cope with opioid misuse. I am deeply grateful for the medical experts who have made this effort happen. And, I wish you all the best for you and your loved ones in this difficult time.
No single organization or individual can cure the disease of addiction. It takes family, friends, colleagues, classmates, communities, treatment partners, and the commitment of government; in short, a village. Addiction is a treatable disease, and there are answers to many of your questions. By pairing a smarter way to present the best resources with on-demand support, we can meet the needs of a community in a more impactful way than ever before.
Methodology
The Opioid Center of Support began our work with an exhaustive analysis of thousands of existing resources on opioid addiction across the internet. We gathered a team of leading data scientists and medical experts, and scored every resource using advanced computer algorithms. While there are many government programs, NGOs, facilities, tools and apps on addiction, our research on these resources has yielded five key takeaways:
- The best information is siloed across many different sources, channels, and formats.
- Resources are informational, and at times educational, but rarely actionable.
- Search, social, and web results are dominated by paid and unregulated commercial platforms.
- There is a profound lack of centralized outcome data (due mostly to a lack of reliable information on the epidemic).
- Existing sites on opioids are visually crowded, informationally dense, and difficult to navigate.
Our approach to solving these problems is an innovative one:
- Focus on supporters and helpers, friends and families, classmates and colleagues, rather than the addicts themselves
- Algorithmically identify and score resources based on ‘performance’ to objectively curate resources in concert with the nation’s leading experts on addiction
- Facilitate community and offer confidential and anonymous live chats as well as access to the highest performing helplines and support communities online
- Encourage users to donate anonymized data allows researchers to model early identification and intervention techniques on opioid addiction
- Ability to customize the experience by uploading the resources you find most helpful
