Auto plant closures associated with increase in opioid deaths

by Alex Fox | Jan. 03, 2020

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Story at a glance

Between 1999 and 2009, the U.S. lost roughly half of its auto manufacturing jobs.
A new study examined the impacts of shuttered auto plants on public health by looking at the rate of fatal opioid overdose in counties that had lost a car factory in the preceding five years.
The researchers found that those counties experienced a sharp increase in deadly overdoses compared to those that had not lost automotive manufacturing, suggesting a strong association between declining economic prospects and the opioid crisis.

Counties that see an auto plant close also experience a sharp increase in fatal opioid overdoses, according to new research. The study suggests a link between declining economic opportunity in the United States and the opioid crisis, the New York Times reports.

The study found that opioid deaths rose roughly 85 percent among people of prime working age in counties that had lost an automotive assembly plant in the previous five years, compared to counties where such factories had not closed.

“For a long time, we’ve been interested in the link between the American dream and America’s health, namely that the fading American dream actually has population health consequences,” Atheendar Venkataramani, lead author of the paper and a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Times. “It’s an unfortunate natural experiment when you have a disintegration of an industry like this through plant closures in that it allows us to understand what the consequences of those negative events are.”

The findings dovetail with prior research showing that job losses negatively impact public health, but the new paper is among the first to suggest that opioid deaths in particular are strongly associated with economic despair.

The researchers sought to use auto plants as a proxy for the larger decline in American manufacturing. To isolate the impacts of losing a factory and its associated jobs, the study focused on counties where manufacturing employed the biggest share of local workers.

The researchers looked at 112 counties near car factories between 1999 and 2016, about a quarter of which had experienced a plant closure. These counties were mostly in the Midwest and the South.

The study’s first ten years coincided with a massive loss of automotive manufacturing jobs, which plummeted from 1.3 million to 650,000. Presently, the industry has come back to around one million jobs.

The researchers say the findings underscore the need to understand and address the social and economic determinants of health. But this sort of finding does have limitations. The increase in opioid deaths cannot solely be attributed to the loss of auto plants and the counties studied account for less than 3 percent of U.S. adults.

Janet Currie, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, told the Times that while the economic conditions identified in this study may have played a role in the rise of the opioid epidemic, past research has shown that the biggest factor was the rampant prescription of opioids.

But the authors say their findings complement rather than conflict with this prior research, saying that their results point to the necessity of a broad approach to public health that also takes into account social and economic factors.