By Michelle Blackwell, August 22, 2019, for Fort Bragg Advocate News
Sixty-three pills for each of us. Sixty-three powerful, addictive doses of opioid – oxycodone, hydrocodone, oxycontin – per year, every year, between 2006 and 2012, for every man, woman and child in Mendocino County.
That is the number of opioids dispensed in the county over that six-year period – 38,751,915 doses total – according to a massive release of data from the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Centers for Disease Control published by the Washington Post last month and shared with publications nationwide, including the Advocate-News and Mendocino Beacon.
A version of the database that focuses on Mendocino County, with information for neighboring counties as well, shows the same trends as have emerged nationwide. Rural counties have been hit unbelievably hard by the opioid epidemic, and the poorer the county, the worse the hit.
Mendocino County’s rate of 63 pills per person per year is dwarfed by Lake County’s 97. In those six years, 43,826,960 opioid doses were sold to Lake County’s 64,005 people (population in 2012). In Humboldt County, the rate was 76 pills per person per year (43,826,960 pills total/134,596 people), while in considerably more affluent Sonoma County, the pills-per-person-per-year rate plunged to 39.
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