The opioid epidemic has not spared Iowa.

Researchers led by Iowa State professors want to find out how communities can tell if their town is at risk and develop plans to combat the problem.

With the help of a five-year research grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, David Peters, an associate professor of rural sociology, will lead the team with sociology professor Andrew Hochstetler and Eric Davis, an assistant professor of computer science.

The Iowa State researchers will be joined by researchers from the University of Iowa as well as Syracuse University in studying risk factors for “micropolitan” communities such as Ottumwa, Iowa, and Marshalltown, Iowa, as well as rural communities with populations of less than 10,000.

University of Iowa and Iowa State researchers will lead the project in Iowa and the Midwest, and researchers at Syracuse University will focus on communities in the Northeast.

Much of the research that has been done regarding the rise in opioid use and deaths has been rooted in quantifying the problem, but Peters and his team intend to look deeper at the reasons behind the epidemic. One possibility they are looking into is the idea that the epidemic is driven by economic factors.

“Our conceptual approach is that rural America, so in areas that … have experienced this big increase in overdose deaths due to opioids, opioid arrests, and over prescription of opioids — we believe that that’s been caused by economic restructuring since the 1970’s,” Peters said. “These rural places that used to have fairly stable mining employment, manufacturing employment, and cultural employment, from the 1970’s to today, those industries have withered.” 

After the data has been collected, the team will identify resilient communities, who have a lower observed risk than projected, and vulnerable communities, who have a higher observed risk than projected and what has worked and not worked for preventing opioid abuse in these areas. The ultimate goal of the project is to find ways to help these communities.

“The whole idea is to first, do the research and identify what’s driving it from a structural or macroeconomic perspective, but the more applied question is to develop a list of best practices and effective strategies that communities can use to combat the opioid epidemic,” Peters said.

The team will bring together a panel of state and local government officials, doctors, pharmacists, victim advocates and former addicts to ensure their strategies are relevant to lived experience.

“We don’t just want it to be an academic exercise,” Peters said.

For more information on the opioid epidemic and its effect on Iowa, follow the Iowa State Daily’s ongoing series on opioids.