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State Health Compare

Prescription opioid painkiller sales in kilograms per 100,000 people, oxycodone and hydrocodone

Measure Overview


IMPORTANT NOTE: This measure has been retired. SHADAC is no longer updating this measure. 
 
In order to maintain State Health Compare (SHC) as a relevant and current resource for data users, SHADAC regularly evaluates SHC measures to ensure they inform current health care and health policy discussions. We also want to be able to update measures consistently with recent data. As a part of this process, SHADAC retires existing measures if they can no longer be updated, are no longer relevant, are little used by SHC users, or fall outside of SHADAC’s areas of focus. 

You can still access this measure’s data and visualizations, but it will not be updated moving forward. If you’d like to explore active related measures, check out some of the following:
Opioid painkillers are powerful prescription medications used to manage severe and chronic pain. Despite the intended benefits of these drugs—including providing relief to individuals who are injured or recovering from surgery—opioid painkillers are highly addictive and can cause life-threatening health problems such as opioid dependence and overdose. Tracking prescription opioid sales can help identify which geographic areas and demographic populations are at increased risk of opioid-related health problems and potential overdose deaths, and can inform policy initiatives aimed at combating the opioid epidemic in the United States.

State Health Compare provides annual, state-level rates of prescription opioid painkiller sales beginning in the year 2000. These rates can be broken down by two of the most commonly prescribed types of opioids: hydrocodone and oxycodone (also known by the brand names “Vicodin” and “Oxycontin,” respectively) and are drawn from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's Automated Reports and Consolidated Ordering System (ARCOS) Retail Drug Summary Reports.

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