8 states that have opioid abuse rates above 5.5 percent

As people across the U.S. continue to struggle with opioid addiction and communities face fatal overdoses, the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity released a two-part report detailing the many facets of the crisis.

As part of one deeper dive, they looked at which states have the highest and lowest rates of opioid prescriptions and non-medical opioid use. The reporters also looked at government action in those states.

In 2014, four states with the most opioid prescriptions had between 1.1 and 1.3 prescriptions written per person.

• West Virginia
• Tennessee
• Arkansas
• Alabama

There were still seven other states with opioid prescription rates that equaled almost or just over one prescription per adult.

• Oklahoma
• Louisiana
• Mississippi
• Kentucky
• Indiana
• Michigan
• South Carolina

While those states were mostly in the Southeast U.S., they were not necessarily the states that had the most non-prescription use of those same drugs in 2013 and 2014. Many of those states had between 4.5 and 5.5 percent use of non-prescription drugs in those years. But many of the other states with the highest percentages of non-prescription pain-killer use were not the ones with the highest rates of prescription opioid use.

Two states had between a 6 percent and 6.2 percent level of use:

• Colorado
• Oklahoma

And several other states had adult populations that were using non-prescription pain killers at rates between 5.5 and 6 percent.

• Oregon
• Arizona
• New Mexico
• Louisiana
• Alabama
• Virginia

When looking at government action related to opioids, the investigators found that New York was the state with the most legislation mentioning opioids between 2013 and 2016. In 2014, it had between 0.5 and 0.7 opioid prescriptions per adult in the state and in 2013 and 2014 the rate of non-prescription opioid use in the state was between 4 and 4.5 percent.

Still, New York is among the 20 states that have almost one pro-opioid lobbyist for every state legislator, including California, Texas, Florida (which had a less than 4 percent non-prescription opioid use rate in 2013 and 2014) and Iowa.

And some of the states that have zero opioid-mentioning state laws (including Kansas, Oregon and Montana). Many of these states had moderately high rates of opioid prescriptions and non-prescription opioid use.