Prescription Drug Histories and Criminal Offending: Using Big Data to Inform the Relationship

• In Event: Understanding the Complexities of Criminal Offending & Drug Use/Misuse

Abstract

The 21st century’s opiate epidemic features divergent drugs, pathways or trajectories and individual/group profiles, which challenge extant research and theory to both understand and intervene in criminal offending. Today, many view the over prescription and misuse of prescription opiates, as potentially harmful and likely to increase the risk of negative social outcomes, including overdose deaths and criminal offending. Moreover, these legal drugs also act as a gateway to illegal drug use (heroin and synthetic opiates), which pose even greater risks of health and social consequences. The current project uses big data from the Census, Delaware’s Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) and the state’s criminal offending database (DELJIS) to study the varied relationships among criminal offending and prescription histories at the community and individual levels. The paper discusses the utility of such big data to improve our understanding and interventions for modern opiate-crime problems, but also calls attention to the important gaps such data currently cannot fill.

Authors

• Tammy L Anderson, University of Delaware

• Steve Martin, University of Delaware

• Daniel O'Connell, University of Delaware

• Jiamin Li, University of Delaware

• Guanwen Qi, University of Delaware