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Opioid Atlas: Mapping Access to Pain Medication

Opiates are some of the most effective pain relief medications available for patients suffering from cancer and surgery-related pain. Despite the affordability and effectiveness of these medications, access to opiates is highly geographically variable. Pain researchers have attributed geographic variation to various factors including the fear of opioid addiction, diversion of legal opiods to the underground market and pharmaceutical industry influences. However, the extent to which there is inequity in untreated cancer and surgery-related pain is unknown. To help opioid investigators study these questions, we designed a tool, the Opioid Atlas, for exploring data on legal opioid consumption, by country and time, collected by the International Narcotics Control Board. Our design borrows ideas from the data visualization and multivariate statistics communities, especially the principles of linking and dimensionality reduction. Our work is relevant to policymakers and pain researchers who wish to systematically assess country-level factors that contribute to differences in opioid access for patients with cancer and surgery-related pain. The Opioid Atlas, and the code behind it, is freely available with an open source license.