Giving Compass' Take:

• According to new research the opioid crisis does not primarily affect rural communities, instead the report finds that economic distress and supply of opioids will predict the rate of opioid deaths.

• How will communities be able to properly address the root cause of the opioid crisis? 

• Here are upstream solutions to the opioid crisis in America. 

In 2017, opioid overdose deaths in the United States reached a record high. And mayors and local leaders across the country have been scrambling to figure out what's driving this precipitous rise of opioid mortality in the last two decades. Several theories have been aired, from aggressive Big Pharma marketing to anxiety among Baby Boomers. Unfortunately, no one-size-fits-all answer exist—how and why this public-health problem manifests locally varies greatly across the U.S.

That's according to a new working paper by Syracuse University sociologist Shannon Monnat and the Institute for New Economic Thinking. It finds that one narrative that gained steam after the 2016 election—the notion of the modern opioid crisis as a disproportionately rural phenomenon that emerged outside of the cities where the "War on Drugs" has been raging for more than three decades—doesn't hold up. Instead, in both rural and urban communities, two key factors—economic distress and supply of opioids—predict the rate of opioid deaths.

Read the full article on where opioid deaths are most likely to occur by Tanvi Misra at Pacific Standard.