Even as the opioid crisis has worsened and garnered widespread attention, in New York and beyond it has remained easier for doctors to prescribe opioids than to prescribe medication-assisted treatment (MAT) to aid in recovery. The maps below show opioid mortality and prescribing trends by county across New York State from 2012 to 2017, as well as the availability of treatment centers that provide medication-assisted treatment.
Total Opioid Deaths: The raw total number of opioid deaths in a county.
Opioid Death Rate per 100,000: The total number of opioid deaths divided by the county population, which is then multiplied by 100,000.
Opioid Prescribing Rate per 100: The rate of retail opioid prescriptions dispensed per 100 people.
The CDC suppresses data for cell sizes representing less than 10 people. Because nine deaths in Philadelphia County (population more than a million) means something very different from nine deaths in Loving County, TX (population less than 100), we estimated crude rates for large counties (population greater than 100,000) of 9.999 and for small counties (populations less than 100,000) of .0999.
* We manually calculated the opioid death rates for counties that had between 10 and 20 total opioid deaths. The CDC provides these raw values but lists the rates as unreliable.
Data on opioid prescribing rates for Hamilton County are missing from the CDC data.
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) WONDER Database, Multiple Cause of Death Dataset, 2012-2017; UCD—Drug/Alcohol Induced Cause Codes: X40-X44, X60-X64, X85, Y10-Y14; MCD—ICD-10 Codes: T40.0, T40.1, T40.2, T40.3, T40.4, T40.6 https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd.html
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) U.S. Opioid Prescribing Rates 2012-2017 https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/maps/rxrate-maps.html