In an effort to prevent future drug overdoses, Arlington County will begin providing people released from the county jail with test strips that can detect the synthetic opioid fentanyl.

“We want every single person to walk out of here with the tools and resources they need to be productive members of the community. Not everyone is in a place where they are ready to enter treatment, but if we can at least keep them safe, we have accomplished something,” said Aubrey Graham, the county’s jail-based behavioral health manager, in a news release that comes on International Overdose Awareness Day.

Starting Sept. 1, the test strips will be handed to people being released from incarceration in a bag of toiletries, which will also include a Metro card and naloxone nasal spray, which reverses an overdose if it does occur. The county is providing trainings for community members in Arlington to learn to administer naloxone, too. A free dose of it is available to anyone who emails narcan@arlingtonva.us.

The county estimates it’s releasing about 20-25 people per month who likely have an opioid use disorder. That number has been increasing of late, and Graham expects that trend to continue.

D.C. also announced tweaks to its opioid overdose prevention strategy, rolling out a new version of its LIVE.LONG.DC plan, which was first announced in 2018. In a press release, District officials said the new version would include a more significant emphasis on trusted peers to help people get into treatment and stick with it, a focus on “vulnerable populations, including pregnant and parenting individuals, youth and young adults, and residents of skilled nursing facilities,” and a more targeted use of data to track and respond to areas that are seeing an uptick in overdoses.

As in Arlington, the District is making an effort to make naloxone more widely available to all Washingtonians, who can pick it up at a wide variety of community locations or receive it by mail or home delivery, all for free without a prescription or an ID. From Oct. 2020 through this July, D.C. has given out more than 40,000 naloxone kits — roughly 8,000 more than it gave out in the previous fiscal year. More than 2,000 overdoses were reversed by naloxone in the District in the same period.

Across the D.C. region and nationally, overdoses are markedly on the rise, spurred by the stress of the pandemic and the disruption in support services it brought. Additionally, the drug supply — including non-opioids — is increasingly laced with fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid frequently associated with overdoses.

In Arlington, police data shows that the county has recorded 22 fatal overdoses so far this year — two more than last year’s total. Non-fatal overdoses — there have been 45 so far this year — are already fast-approaching the 2020 total of 54.

The commonwealth of Virginia saw the largest number of fatal drug overdoses (677) on record in a single quarter in the first part of 2021, according to the state’s medical examiner.

“Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, fatal overdoses increased significantly and continue to remain record breaking through 2021,” the medical examiner’s quarterly report summarizes. “Fatal overdoses, all substances, increased 41.9% in 2020 compared to 2019.”

The story is tragically similar in D.C., which has long struggled to combat its own opioid epidemic. Some 411 people died of overdoses in the District in 2020, up 46% from the previous year to an all-time high. The vast majority (94%) of those fatal overdoses involved fentanyl. And the death toll in D.C. falls disproportionately on African Americans, who account for 84% of fatal overdose deaths in the city since 2016.

In Arlington, people struggling with substance use disorder and their families can also seek help from a number of local treatment options and support groups. The county also encourages citizens to drop off unused or expired prescription medications at four drug take-back box locations or by requesting a medication deactivation bag for free at aari@arlingtonva.us.

Nationally, anyone seeking help with a substance use disorder can call the U.S. Substance Use and Mental Health Services Administration’s 24/7 hotline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).