The Economic Cost of the Opioid Crisis in the U.S. — A State-by-State Comparison

At the closing of 2017, new research and mortality data shed additional light on the growing severity of the opioid epidemic in the U.S. In November, the White House Council of Economic Advisors published a report investigating the economic burden attributable to opioid overdose deaths, and individuals with opioid use disorder. By fully accounting for the economic value of lives lost to the epidemic, the CEA study estimated the burden of opioid use disorder and overdose deaths to be $504 billion, or 2.8 percent of gross domestic product in the U.S. during 2015. This far exceeded previous estimates.

The following month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the final national mortality data for 2016, finding that life expectancy in the U.S. had actually fallen for the second consecutive year. An unprecedented trend for a developed nation, the latest mortality data support previous research suggesting Americans are living shorter lives because of opioid-related “deaths of despair.” The CDC found that 67,265 Americans died from drug-induced causes in 2016, which were dominated by 41,918 opioid overdoses, marking a one-year, 29 percent increase from 2015. More recently, CDC released 2017 data that found 47,576 opioid-related deaths in the U.S. Since the CEA study was published, based on 2015 CDC data, the number of opioid-related deaths in the U.S. grew from 32,493 to 47,576 — an increase of more than 15,000 deaths, or 46 percent in a two-year period.

The CDC data also reveal significant variation in the severity of the opioid crisis between individual states. Using CEA methods and updated CDC mortality data, this policy brief estimates the economic burden of the opioid epidemic at the state-level during 2017.