Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2024 Nov 22;21(1):206.
doi: 10.1186/s12954-024-01123-6.

Community alcohol sales and opioid poisoning deaths: Alcohol serving space as a harm reduction opportunity

Affiliations
Free article

Community alcohol sales and opioid poisoning deaths: Alcohol serving space as a harm reduction opportunity

Cory M Morton et al. Harm Reduct J. .
Free article

Abstract

The concurrent use of opioids and alcohol is particularly dangerous for individuals. Alcohol is commonly seen in opioid overdose death toxicology reports and, concurrent use of alcohol and opioids is often reported by individuals across a diverse range of opioid use profiles. This study investigates whether there is a community-level relationship between alcohol sales and opioid-related overdose deaths to inform the situating of harm reduction efforts in spaces most likely to reduce substance-related harms. Using an ecological design, zip code-level data for New Hampshire were combined from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey (sociodemographics), the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association (alcohol retail sales), and the NH Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (zip code level opioid poisoning deaths) to investigate the relationship between alcohol sales and opioid-related poisoning deaths at a community level in a state with the third highest rate of opioid poisoning deaths for the year the current study represents. Using a spatial error regression model approach, opioid-related poisoning deaths were higher in zip codes with greater population density and on-premise alcohol sales and were lower in zip codes with greater off-premise alcohol sales and area disadvantage. The findings here co-locate higher levels of on-premise alcohol sales and opioid-related poisoning deaths at a community-level, mirroring individual-level findings on the danger of mixing these two substances. Results inform harm reduction approaches by identifying substance use spaces where overdose prevention messaging or policy change may be most effective.

Keywords: Alcohol outlets; Community; GIS; Harm reduction; Overdose deaths.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics approval and consent to participate: Not applicable. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

References

    1. National Institute on Drug Abuse. Drug overdose death rates. 2023. Retrieved: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
    1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Evidence-based strategies for preventing opioid overdose: What’s working in the United States. 2022. Retrieved: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/featured-topics/evidence-based-strategi...
    1. Xu J, Davis CS, Cruz M, Lurie P. State naloxone access laws are associated with an increase in the number of naloxone prescriptions dispensed in retail pharmacies. Drug Alcohol Depend. 2018;189:37–41. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Yarbrough CR, Abraham AJ, Bagwell Adams G. Relationship of county opioid epidemic severity to changes in access to substance use disorder treatment, 2009–2017. Psychiatric Serv. 2020;71(1):12–20. - DOI
    1. Bozorgi P, Porter DE, Eberth JM, Eidson JP, Karami A. The leading neighborhood-level predictors of drug overdose: a mixed machine learning and spatial approach. Drug Alcohol Depend. 2021;229(Part). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2021.109143 .

Substances

LinkOut - more resources