Abstract:
The mortality burden imposed by the opioid crisis has only increased in recent years, with particularly high increases among Black Americans, who now die from overdoses at higher rates than their white counterparts. As such, a large body of work has emphasized the adverse impact of racial and socioeconomic segregation as a key mechanism of enduring racial health disparities. Also, nascent research has increasingly sought to use cell phone mobility data to examine neighborhood outcomes. This work bridges these two areas of work to look at opioid overdose rates from Cook County, Illinois – the county with the largest number of Black overdoses in the United States—to explore how neighborhood-level characteristics shape these disparities. We find that a neighborhood’s level of disadvantage, as measured by the everyday visitors to the neighborhood, is a focal predictor. Moreover, while neighborhoods with a higher share of Black residents have higher rates of opioid-related mortality, we illustrate that our measure of mobility-based disadvantage mediates 100 % of the relationship. These findings remain consistent throughout the pre-2020 (2016–2019) and post-2020 (2020–2023) period when opioid-related mortality spikes. Sensitivity analyses with a wide assortment of controls and different specifications confirm these findings and suggest that future work examining neighborhood disadvantage should consider mobility-based measures in addition to static ones to best identify how disadvantage shapes mortality risk.