National data says substance abuse is on the decline. These charts tell a different story.
National averages hide the counties that desperately need our help.
By Sara Chodosh Yesterday at 8:00am
In a country as large as the United States, national averages can quickly lose all meaning. Deaths from alcohol use disorders, for example, have dropped nationally by 8.1 percent since 1980. But in some counties, deaths have doubled in that same timeframe.
The question of why isn’t an easy one to answer. Health data on suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol abuse are severely lacking. Most studies trying to look at county-level data are from the ‘80s and ‘90s, so even if policy makers want to figure out where the problem areas are, they don’t have access to sufficiently detailed information. That’s exactly what a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association aims to fix.
https://www.popsci.com/substance-abuse-rates-by-county-death
