WASHINGTON — Significantly more people are dying from heroin overdoses across the Washington, D.C., area than were a few years ago — and it’s spurring new action in Virginia.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced a new strategy this week to combat heroin and prescription opiate abuse that he describes as a “long-term effort.”

His office says more than 800 Virginians died from all types overdoses in 2012, and 197 died of heroin overdoses alone in 2013. In Northern Virginia, heroin overdose deaths jumped 164 percent between 2011 and 2013.

“These are real people whose lives are devastated. I was at an event a few months ago and a woman in Northern Virginia told me the story about her daughter, she was 22 years old, who died from a heroin overdose, and she looked at me straight in the eye, and said,