Deaths from drug overdose in 2017 alone exceeded the total number of Americans who died during the entire Vietnam War, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. The majority of those, of course, were opioids.
It’s virtually impossible to report on health today and not cover the opioid epidemic, whether in-depth, occasionally or tangentially. That’s particularly true in areas hit hardest by opioid use and overdoses, such as Appalachia (Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia), Maryland/D.C., and New England (Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts).
It helps, then, to have a handy list of resources to quickly retrieve data on opioids, whether it’s background context info, trends, statistics or state-specific or global data. The AHCJ Medical Studies Core Topic now has a section specifically on data about opioids.
These include obvious stops, such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as sites with downloadable data tables for those wanting to sift through the raw numbers themselves.
While much of these data are easily found through online searches, it helps to have a list of links compiled to save you those extra steps of sifting through search results.
