Deviating from its more typical “best of (neighborhoods, doctors, crab shacks…)” lifestyle articles, Baltimore Magazine featured in its July issue a far less sunny piece on the ravaging impacts of Hagerstown, Md.’s opioid crisis. Can H-Town Kick Its Habit?, by Ron Cassie and Lauren Larocca, describes what’s become an all too familiar story of how a once thriving rural community lost its economic base — in this case, manufacturing — and, over time, the businesses and jobs it directly and indirectly supported. Growth stalled, buildings were shuttered, and the cross section of highways that once carried resources and products in and out of town today enable the convenient trafficking of heroin, fentanyl, and other drugs. The death toll has since been climbing precipitously.

The perilous connections between economic decay, deepening despair, and the shocking rise in related overdoses and suicides — in Hagerstown and around the country — have been well-documented. As Elizabeth Kneebone and Scott Allard demonstrate in a 2017 report, almost every county in the United States experienced an uptick in drug overdose deaths between 2000 and 2015; none registered a decline. Moreover, it is largely poor counties — and counties that became poorer between 2000 and 2015 — that have been among the hardest hit. New U.S. Department of Health Human Services research confirms that, on average, areas with lower economic prospects have higher rates of opioid prescriptions, hospitalizations, and overdose deaths.

Read the full article about the role location plays in addiction by Jennifer S. Vey at Brookings.