Late last year, Ohio State University’s C. William Swank Program in Rural-Urban Policy conducted a research study entitled “Taking Measure of Ohio’s Opioid Crisis” which aims to evaluate the cost of the opioid crisis in Ohio and to highlight insights that can inform policy making.
This study estimates that there were 92,000 to 170,000 Ohioans abusing or dependent upon opioids in 2015. The reason the estimate is so wide ranging is because data on opioid usage and dependency can only be collected through surveys, which can suffer from inaccuracies due to the hesitancy respondents to answer honestly on questions about illegal drug use. So, the study made an estimate based on national surveys and Ohio overdose data.
The costs associated with opioid addiction are broadly distributed across these four categories:
- Health care and treatment costs
- Criminal justice costs
- Lost productivity among current opioid abusers
- Lost productivity of drug overdose deaths
The study calculates the total cost of opioid dependency in Ohio in 2015 ranged from $6.6 billion to $8.8 billion. To put this into perspective, Ohio spent $8.2 billion of General Revenue Funds and Lottery Profits money on K-12 public education in 2015, thus, the opioid crisis was likely as costly as the state’s spending on K-12 education.
The study also found that these cost are unevenly distributed across the state, reflecting the variation in the severity of opioid abuse. In 2015, Clark and Brown counties each had per capita costs associated with opioid abuse of more than $1,400 per capita, while five counties in the state had costs of less than $100 per capita. The highest per capita costs were concentrated in the southwest quadrant of Ohio where per capita costs were more than $1,000 in most counties.
Besides the economic toll it takes on the state and counties, the personal and social costs of opioid addiction and abuse is high for addicts, their families, and their communities. Free or affordable treatment rehabs are available in Ohio. For even more resources, check out our Recovery Resource page.
