That's 81 prescriptions dispensed per 100 people. If each prescription is for three months of pills that's 20 people-years of opioid dispensed per 100 people.

>For this database, a prescription is a new or refill prescription dispensed at a retail pharmacy in the sample and paid for by commercial insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, cash or its equivalent, and other third-party coverage. This database does not include mail order prescriptions.

>For the calculation of dispensing rates, numerators are the projected total number of opioid prescriptions dispensed annually at the state, county, or national level. Annual resident population denominators were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Am I reading this right? They're counting scripts and then dividing that over the population? So if we imagine a state with a population of 12 people, one of whom is a chronic pain patient or cancer patient with an opioid prescription, that would show as 100 dispenses per 100 population (1 patient, 12 scripts)? That seems almost worthless as a metric.

Good catch. Still nuts, especially if you layer it with antidepressants.

Some states were 107< per 100 for the opioids. How does that impact the movement of the Overton window over the last decade+ I wonder?