Reframing the Opioid Crisis: Understanding the Disparities in Responses Towards Drug Crises in the United States

Abstract

This study focuses on the opioid crisis and tries to contextualize it within the different responses to drug crises over the past several decades. There have been several works which have focused on the disparity of how the United States has responded to drug crises, and many others which have surveyed United States citizens’ perceptions of drug policy. However, this work is novel in that it focuses on United States citizens’ perceptions of current responses to the opioid crisis, and it intends to capture if there are any biases influencing how the general population perceives appropriate responses to drug epidemics. This study is designed in a way to capture potential biases, and the hypothesis was that people would be biased towards minority populations, and towards drugs that have been associated with minority populations in higher numbers. After administering the survey to approximately 1500 respondents from the general population, this study fails to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in the averages for how participants perceived what would be an appropriate punishment for drug users of varying races and drugs. Breaking down respondents into various subgroups yielded some statistically significant results, but they were sporadic. While there was a general lack of statistically significant results, there were patterns among subgroups that indicated certain demographics were more averse to punishment for different combinations of treatment effects. Overall, the study indicates that there is a lack of significant bias in the general population regarding responses to appropriate drug policies for the current opioid crisis, and it could be a critical time to continue to frame drug crises as public health issues, embracing treatment and harm reduction strategies that recognize addiction as a disease.