The fact that rural, economically disadvantaged parts of the country broke heavily for the Republican candidate in the 2016 election is well known. But Medicare data indicate that voters in areas that went for Trump weren't just hurting economically — many of them were receiving prescriptions for opioid painkillers.
The findings were published Friday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.Researchers found a geographic relationship between support for Trump and prescriptions for opioid painkillers.
It's easy to see similarities between the places hardest hit by the opioid epidemic and a map of Trump strongholds. "When we look at the two maps, there was a clear overlap between counties that had high opioid use ... and the vote for Donald Trump," says Dr. James S. Goodwin, chair of geriatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the study's lead author. "There were blogs from various people saying there was this overlap. But we had national data."
[For more on this story by PAUL CHISHOLM, go to https://www.npr.org/sections/h...rump-support-in-2016]
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