The Economic and Social Determinants of the Opioid Epidemic

This study will examine the role played by social interactions, and community ties more generally, in the recent opioid epidemic in the United States. A distinguishing feature of the opioid epidemic is that prescription medications are misused. Moreover, the epidemic has been concentrated in rural white populations, not all of which are poor. We hypothesize that these unusual patterns are observed because the novel opioid drugs, whose negative consequences were less known initially, spread relatively rapidly in tight-knit rural communities. We will test this hypothesis by (i) constructing a measure of social connectedness that is based on crop suitability, (ii) validating this measure with multiple data sets, and (iii) estimating the relationship between opioid mortality and social connectedness.