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• Posted January 30, 2025

Opioid Painkillers Less Available To People Of Color

People of color now have less access to prescription opioid painkillers than white patients, an unintended consequence of efforts to stem America’s opioid epidemic.

Communities of color have a 40% to 45% lower distribution of commonly prescribed opioids, compared to majority white communities, researchers reported in a study published Jan. 23 in the journal Pain.

This could prevent opioid painkillers from reaching those in true need of them, like cancer patients, researchers said.

“Our findings highlight concerns that racially and ethnically minoritized communities, especially the most deprived communities, may have consistently experienced inadequate access to effective pain management amid rapid declines in opioid analgesics during this time,” a team led by Allison Ju-Chen Hu, a postdoctoral associate of population health sciences with Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, concluded.

Prescription opioid use dropped by about 50% between 2011 and 2021 across the United States, as federal and state officials enacted policies to counter a rise in opioid addiction and overdose, researchers said in background notes.

Neighborhood pharmacies and health care facilities also started carrying fewer opioid painkillers, potentially making it harder for people to fill prescriptions needed for legitimate pain management, researchers said.

For example, opioid prescriptions for cancer or hospice patients have declined at a comparable rate to that of the general population, even though those patients have a legitimate need for the painkillers.

To see which communities were most affected by the clampdown, researchers analyzed data from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from 2011 to 2021 that reported distribution of prescription morphine, oxycodone and hydrocodone.

Combined, those three drugs made up 70% of U.S. opioid prescriptions in 2017, researchers noted.

Researchers used ZIP code data to track distribution of the drugs and U.S. Census Bureau data to classify communities as “majority white” or “majority non-white.”

Results showed that fewer prescription opioids were being delivered to pharmacies and health care centers in communities of color, researchers said.

“The lower distribution in majority non-White communities was statistically significant across all socioeconomic deprivation levels and over all study years,” researchers wrote. 

The DEA sets manufacturing quotas for opioid painkillers and has reduced those quotas substantially since 2016, researchers noted. The agency typically sets quotas based on how many prescriptions have been dispensed in each community.

“Notably, this approach may reinforce the insufficient availability of opioid analgesics by keeping quotas low in communities where opioid analgesics are chronically understocked, a scenario more likely to be seen in racially and ethnically minoritized communities,” the researchers said.

They said the DEA should reassess its quota policy to make sure opioid painkillers are being fairly distributed across all communities.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the opioid epidemic.

SOURCE: Weill Cornell Medicine, news release, Jan. 23, 2025