School of Public Policy Assistant Professor Scott Ganz and AEI Resident Fellow Alex Brill recently published a paper that examines the geographic variation in economic burden for the opioid crisis. Professor Ganz and Mr. Brill estimate per-capita state-level and county-level non-mortality and total economic burdens of the opioid crisis by distributing national estimates based on variation in local wages, health care costs, and criminal justice costs They also take into account the variation in opioid-related death and addiction rate combined with average age-adjusted value of statistical lives lost.

Professor Ganz and Mr. Brill find that non-mortality per-capita economic burden of the opioid crisis is highest in the District of Columbia and lowest in Iowa. When morality costs are factored, West Virginia has the highest per-capita burden and Nebraska the lowest. Furthermore, after examining county-level estimates of the cost of the opioid epidemic, they find the highest non-mortality per-capita costs in counties in California, Colorado, and Virginia, while highest total costs are in counties in Kentucky and West Virginia.

See Professor Ganz's paper here: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Geographic_Variation_in_…;