Database: See where your county ranks in opioid prescriptions

Live in Kansas or Missouri and want to see where your county ranks in opioid prescriptions per person? Search for it with this database of numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

The data released by the CDC shows that some rural counties in Kansas and Missouri had high levels of opioid prescriptions per person in 2015.

The CDC study counts how many opioid prescriptions are filled within a county and how concentrated those prescriptions are. Then the CDC combines the two counts to describe how much opiate-based medicine is circulating in the county. It calls that number a “morphine milligram equivalent,” or MME, per person.

In 2015, the most recent year the CDC measured, Morton County had the highest MME in Kansas or Missouri — 2,445.1 MME per person. That was the 17th highest rate among about 3,000 counties nationwide that submitted data (180 counties did not).

In Missouri, the highest ranked was Howell County near Springfield. It ranked 30th nationally in the CDC study, with 2,157.8 MME per person.

The core counties of the Kansas City metro area were in the middle of the pack nationally, with Platte County at 565.4 MME, Jackson County at 646.8 MME, Johnson County at 650.5 MME, Wyandotte County at 700.3 MME and Clay County at 774.1 MME.

Cass County had the highest rate of opioid prescriptions among Jackson County’s neighbors at 1,015.5 MME, which ranked about 600th nationally.

Search the database to see whether your county has an increase in opioid prescriptions.

This story was originally published July 31, 2017 at 3:00 PM with the headline "Database: See where your county ranks in opioid prescriptions."