How Many People in Caddo Parish Do You Think are Taking Opioids?
As the phrase goes, there's good news and bad news. So, which do we want first? Okay, the good. Over the past 15 years the national average of prescriptions for opioid medications has fallen.
Here's the bad. A cluster of six states across the southern USA are part of the country that is still way above the national average. And Louisiana is one of them.
Louisiana Far Outpaces the National Average
In a story by KTBS TV, Louise Bryde with Stroudwater Associates, a healthcare consulting firm working with the CDC, says, “The US average rate from the standpoint of opioid dispensing rate was just over 43 prescriptions per 100 persons. That's the unit that they utilized, So that was the national average. Louisiana for that same time period was just over 68 prescriptions per 100 persons.”
In simpler terms, what Stroudwater discovered is that for every 100 people in Louisiana, doctors have written 68 opioid prescriptions.
And Shreveport and Caddo are Even Higher
And Caddo Parish has far and away, the highest rate of opioid prescriptions in the state.
The CDC / Stroudwater results show that Caddo Parish has 134 prescriptions written per 100 people, almost double the rate for Louisiana. Rapides Parish is the second highest in the state with 117 prescriptions per 100. And Orleans, Louisiana's most populated parish, is at 87 prescriptions for every 100.
“So Caddo Parish, as you I think saw is actually a well over 100 prescriptions per 100 persons,” Bryde tells KTBS, “And that's obviously very significantly above both your statewide rate and then even further...above the national rate.”