Cost of Opioid Crisis to Average Rhode Islander is $2.8K — 6th Highest in U.S.

Cost of Opioid Crisis to Average Rhode Islander is $2.8K — 6th Highest in U.S.

The opioid crisis is tragic and has been devastating for many Rhode Island families, and a new study says the costs of the crisis is hitting all Rhode Island hard from an expense standpoint.

According to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the per capita for Rhode Islanders is $2,820 — West Virginia has the highest cost $4,378 per capita.

Nebraska has the lowest cost at just $394 per capita

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

“Opioid abuse is an epidemic in the United States, claiming more than 42,000 lives in 2016 alone (CDC 2017c). In addition to its devastating impact on families and communities, the opioid epidemic is costing the US economy tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars annually. The types of costs attributable to opioid abuse – health care costs, criminal justice costs, and lost productivity, for example – are fairly well understood, as is the economic impact of the crisis at the national level,”writes the report which was authored by Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute and Scott Ganz of Georgia Institute of Technology.

“However, the economic burden of the opioid epidemic is unevenly distributed across the country, with many communities especially hard hit. As federal, state, and local policymakers and stakeholders seek to curb the epidemic, it is vitally important that they know how these costs are distributed,” the reports states.

Governor Gina Raimondo describes the opioid crisis an epidemic, “In the past five years, we've lost more than 1,200 Rhode Islanders to overdose. The opioid epidemic is the single greatest public health crisis facing our nation.”

Five-Fold Increase

The AEI report says, "Opioids are claiming an alarming and increasing number of lives in the United States, and the epidemic has worsened drastically in recent years. The number of deaths in the United States attributable to opioids increased more than fivefold from 8,048 in 1999 to 42,249 in 2016. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) now estimates that 115 Americans die daily from prescription opioid analgesics, heroin, and fentanyl (2018). "