Abstract
In light of opioid-associated harms in the past few decades, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has declared a public health emergency that includes a focus on curbing opioid prescribing trends and their negative effects. Higher opioid analgesic (i.e., opioid drugs used for pain management) prescribing rates are associated with various adverse public health-related outcomes. In general, prescribers in the state of California, the most populous in the United States, prescribe opioids at a lower rate than the national prescribing rate average, and certain key opioid-related health outcomes have occurred less frequently in California than the national average. Still, local (i.e., county-level) opioid prescribing trends can vary in their intensity and have not yet been sufficiently researched. This criminoepidemiologic book will use California’s CURES 2.0 data, which was submitted to the national Prescription Behavior Surveillance System (PBSS) database, to analyze county-level opioid prescribing rates in California from 2012 to 2017 from multiple perspectives. The current project will present California’s county-level opioid prescribing trends, examine potential correlates of opioid prescribing rates, assess the association of opioid prescribing on both criminal justice and public health outcomes, and consider this project’s overall principal findings and the implications for policy and practice.
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Jennings, W.G., Perez, N., Delcher, C., Wang, Y. (2020). Introduction to the Opioid Crisis. In: Opioid Prescribing Rates and Criminal Justice and Health Outcomes. SpringerBriefs in Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40764-3_1
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