“128 People Die Every Day from an Opioid Overdose.” – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1

Overview

Before the Coronavirus, there was another public health emergency: the opioid epidemic. While the opioid epidemic may seem like a recent problem, it has been a public health problem for the last 20 years, and we are in the thick of the third wave.

The CDC classifies the opioid epidemic into three different waves 2. The first wave of the opioid epidemic began in the 90s with the introduction of prescription opioids like OxyContin. As the state and federal governments started to crack down on the misuse of prescription opioids, more opioid users turned to heroin during the second wave of the epidemic 3. The third wave of the opioid epidemic is characterized by the rise in use of synthetic opioids, like fentanyl 4. As seen in the visualization at the top of the page, some of the hardest hit states during this third wave are Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

There are bipartisan efforts to combat the opioid epidemic. In 2016, under the Obama Administration, Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act 5 and the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA) 6. In 2017, under the Trump Administration, the federal government declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency. As part of the fight against the opioid epidemic, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) created the State Targeted Response (STR) and the State Opioid Response (SOR) grants 7. The SAMHSA began awarding SOR grants in 2018. The total SOR grants awarded to each state, for 2018 and 2019, are visualized in the map below.

The goal of the SOR grants is to provide financial support for the prevention, treatment, and recovery of opioid misuse in the United States 8.

Data Description

The main source of data for the Opioid Deaths in the United States map above comes from VSRR Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts dataset 9. While the years in the dataset range from 2015 to 2019, I subsetted the data to just 2018 and 2019, using a Python script 10, for the brevity of the visualization. I used the monthly drug overdose deaths counts from the Indicator column as a proxy for opioid overdose death counts. Then, I normalized those drug overdose death counts by dividing them by the yearly state population estimates from the United States Census Bureau 11. I multiplied the normalized death counts by 100,000 so the data was easier to read. As a result, the units of the data in the first map are the number of opioid deaths/state population multiplied by 100,000. Thus, the specific counts on the map are not that informative. Instead, the important part of the map is the relative intensity of cases in each state as indicated by the depth of the red hue on the map.

The data for the State Opioid Response Grants map comes from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services 12. The units of the State Opioid Response Grant data is millions (USD). The darker the blue hue on the map, the more money was awarded to that state through the State Opioid Response grant program. In the same Python script as above, I cleaned the data by subsetting the it down to just the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Then, I exported the two datasets as separate comma separated value (.csv) files for visualization.

The data was visualized using QGIS 13. To visualize each month in the opioid death counts dataset, I loaded the final .csv into QGIS as a delimited text file and filtered the dataset by the specific year and month. Then, I joined the filtered dataset with the U.S. States Boundary shapefiles from the United States Census Bureau 14. Once the individual map layers were assembled, they were exported to a PNG image format 15. The map images were compiled into an animated Gif16 using GIMP 17 and then converted into a MPEG-4 video format 18 using FFmpeg 19.

Author: Jenna Ollen. Last edited: 2020-05-05.

  1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Understanding the Epidemic”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html↩︎

  2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Understanding the Epidemic”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html↩︎

  3. Bipartisan Polict Center. “Tracking Federal Funding to Combat the Opioid Crisis”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/tracking-federal-funding-to-combat-the-opioid-crisis/↩︎

  4. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Understanding the Epidemic”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html↩︎

  5. United States Food & Drug Administration. “21st Century Cures Act”. Accessed 2020-05-04 Online: https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/selected-amendments-fdc-act/21st-century-cures-act↩︎

  6. Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America. “Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act”. Accessed 2020-05-04 Online: https://www.cadca.org/comprehensive-addiction-and-recovery-act-cara↩︎

  7. Bipartisan Polict Center. “Tracking Federal Funding to Combat the Opioid Crisis”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/tracking-federal-funding-to-combat-the-opioid-crisis/↩︎

  8. Bipartisan Polict Center. “Tracking Federal Funding to Combat the Opioid Crisis”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/tracking-federal-funding-to-combat-the-opioid-crisis/↩︎

  9. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “VSRR Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/vsrr-provisional-drug-overdose-death-counts-54e35↩︎

  10. Python. Version 3.8.1. Copyright (C) 2001–2019. Python Software Foundation. Accessed 2020-05-04. Online: https://www.python.org↩︎

  11. United States Census Bureau. “State Population Totals and Components of Change: 2010-2019”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2010s-state-total.html#par_textimage↩︎

  12. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. “State Opioid Response Grants by State”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2019/09/04/state-opioid-response-grants-by-state.html↩︎

  13. QGIS. Version 3.10 . Software released through CC-BY-SA by the QGIS Development Team. Accessed 2020-05-04. Online: https://www.qgis.org↩︎

  14. United States Census Bureau. “Cartographic Boundary Files - Shapefile”. Accessed 2020-04-25 Online: https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/carto-boundary-file.html↩︎

  15. Portable Network Graphics (PNG). Copyright 1995–2019 Greg Roelofs. Accessed 2020-05-04. Online: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/↩︎

  16. Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). Copyright 1987–1990 CompuServe. Accessed 2020-05-04. Online: https://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt↩︎

  17. GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Version 2.10. Software released through CC-BY-SA by The GIMP Development Team. Accessed 2020-05-04. Online: https://www.gimp.org/↩︎

  18. Moving Picture Experts Group Standard 4 (MPEG-4). Standard developed by a working group of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) joint technical committee. Accessed 2020-05-04. Online: https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/↩︎

  19. FFmpeg is a trademark of Fabrice Bellard. Software released under GNU LGPL 2.1. Version 4.2.2. Accessed 2020-05-04. Online: https://ffmpeg.org/↩︎