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How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

washingtonpost.com

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Re: How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

#3

Post by rubyn00bie »

Woah... just woah, so am I mathing this wrong, or from 2006-2012 there were ~250 pain pills per person (man, woman, child) sold in America? Because if so, I don't know how on earth any executive couldn't be fucking liable for knowing the vast majority being manufactured and sold were being used illicitly.

Re: How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

#4

Post by danso »

I'm not sure if WaPo just made their paywall more aggressive, but I can't seem to read this URL now w/o logging in. They do provide a direct URL from Cloudflare to the raw data, which is about 7GB compressed and uncompresses to a single tab-delimited text file with 180M rows at 80GB:

    https://d2ty8gaf6rmowa.cloudfront.net/dea-pain-pill-database/bulk/arcos_all_washpost.tsv.gz
There is also individual state level data with the following format (replace `il` – i.e. IL for Illinois – with the state postal code of your choice):

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/dea-pain-pill-database/summary/arcos-il-statewide-itemized.tsv.gz
That said, the data is fairly hard to understand without reading the article so it's likely much more efficient to login to read it and download. Here's a tweet thread with context from the WaPo's data editor:

https://twitter.com/dataeditor/status/1151904218095194112

And here's a 10K row random sample to preview in Google Sheets:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19NZtjOEPxNdNfZS9l-yZ...

Re: How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

#5

Post by diminoten »

danso wrote: post #4

I'm not sure if WaPo just made their paywall more aggressive, but I can't seem to read this URL now w/o logging in. They do provide a direct URL from Cloudflare to the raw data, which is about 7GB compressed and uncompresses to a single tab-delimited text file with 180M rows at 80GB: https://d2ty8gaf6rmowa.cloudfront.net/dea-pain-pill-database/bulk/arcos_all_washpost.tsv.gz There is also individual state level data w…

I am able to read the site without trouble. I have all cookies from washingtonpost.com blocked though, so I don't know if that's what lets me get through.

Re: How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

#6

Post by jdsully »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #3

Woah... just woah, so am I mathing this wrong, or from 2006-2012 there were ~250 pain pills per person (man, woman, child) sold in America? Because if so, I don't know how on earth any executive couldn't be fucking liable for knowing the vast majority being manufactured and sold were being used illicitly.

Everyone has plausible deniability that theirs follows a secure supply chain to the pharmacy. Its those other guys that can’t control their inventory.

Nobody has an incentive to audit their supply chains or doctor RXs to verify that of course.

Re: How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

#7

Post by [deleted] »

danso wrote: post #4

I'm not sure if WaPo just made their paywall more aggressive, but I can't seem to read this URL now w/o logging in. They do provide a direct URL from Cloudflare to the raw data, which is about 7GB compressed and uncompresses to a single tab-delimited text file with 180M rows at 80GB: https://d2ty8gaf6rmowa.cloudfront.net/dea-pain-pill-database/bulk/arcos_all_washpost.tsv.gz There is also individual state level data w…

[deleted]

Re: How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

#8

Post by refurb »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #3

Woah... just woah, so am I mathing this wrong, or from 2006-2012 there were ~250 pain pills per person (man, woman, child) sold in America? Because if so, I don't know how on earth any executive couldn't be fucking liable for knowing the vast majority being manufactured and sold were being used illicitly.

I was reading another discussion among physicians about this and the number isn't that excessive.

50M Americans have chronic pain, assume 10M (20%) are on opioids. 76B pills over 10 years is 7.6B per year, so 760 pills per [chronic pain + opioid] person per year. Take 4 pills per day or 120 per month or 1440 per year. So basically 6 months of therapy for every chronic pain patient in the US.

Re: How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

#9

Post by dreamcompiler »

danso wrote: post #4

I'm not sure if WaPo just made their paywall more aggressive, but I can't seem to read this URL now w/o logging in. They do provide a direct URL from Cloudflare to the raw data, which is about 7GB compressed and uncompresses to a single tab-delimited text file with 180M rows at 80GB: https://d2ty8gaf6rmowa.cloudfront.net/dea-pain-pill-database/bulk/arcos_all_washpost.tsv.gz There is also individual state level data w…

I was able to read it by disabling Javascript.

Re: How to download and use the DEA pain pills database

#10

Post by mruts »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #3

Woah... just woah, so am I mathing this wrong, or from 2006-2012 there were ~250 pain pills per person (man, woman, child) sold in America? Because if so, I don't know how on earth any executive couldn't be fucking liable for knowing the vast majority being manufactured and sold were being used illicitly.

Doctors prescribed them, so who cares?

I personally think we should just be able to buy any drug we want at a convenience store, but what do I know?

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