Congressional districts in the South, Appalachia and the rural West were home to the highest opioid prescribing rates in the nation in 2016, a new analysis from Harvard University researchers shows, while districts with well-known hubs in California, New York and Virginia boasted the lowest.
Published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, the study from researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is thought to be the first to focus on opioid prescribing rates at the congressional district level. The analysis involved constructing district-level rate estimates using U.S. Census Bureau population blocks and county-level prescription data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
