21 The elected County Board of Supervisors has begun to see the fallout from the crisis, reflected in the increased reporting in various departments of overtime pay and personnel vacancies. Informally, they are hearing of opioid-related problems from their constituents and, in some cases, from family and friends reporting the personal impact on their own lives of circumstances not very different from those experienced by Kerry and her family. The Board of Supervisors was also keenly aware of the President’s declaration of the opioid epidemic as a public health emergency – as well as of years of ongoing media reports on the crisis by CNN, CBS’ 60 Minutes, the New York Times and Washington Post, and numerous state and local journalistic organizations. Once a quarter, the Human Services Director and her counterparts in the courts, law enforcement, the jail, public health and education, along with invited department heads, gather for an early-morning breakfast meeting with the Board of Supervisors. Recently, one supervisor indicated that he was considering placing on the agenda for the next meeting how the County Human Services Director was responding to the opioid/heroin epidemic in their jurisdiction.  At the quarterly breakfast meeting, the Human Services Director calls for the formation of a task force to address the epidemic. She identifies the cross-jurisdictional program silo challenges she currently faces and cites the need to be “out in front” of this issue with the Board of Supervisors. She especially wants to get a sense of the magnitude of the numbers of people with this illness, and to know if the different systems are dealing with the same clients or different clients, and finally whether there could be more cross system case planning.   She then introduces her Drug and Alcohol Director, who presents Kerry’s case as one that is typical. She calls for the task force to deal with this epidemic in the same manner in which Homeland Security’s cross-jurisdictional challenges were addressed over a decade ago. She also calls for the establishment of a county network of services, both within government and within the community to address the larger goal of enhanced information sharing to achieve more coordinated, client-centered care. [Information required: data describing actual opioid use and addiction, caseload statistics for law enforcement, mental health, child welfare, adult services, housing services showing the percentage of cases involving opioid use disorder, meaningful statistics about the extent of particular drug involvement, overdose (both fatal and non-fatal) statistics by geographical area, data describing the types, age, gender and other social characteristics of those with substance use disorder, research showing trends in all of the above categories of data, projections of longer term trends, evidence-bases strategies that have worked elsewhere in dealing with the opioid crisis]