A study of drug overdose deaths finds there several different simultaneous opioid epidemics in the country rather than just a single crisis. Iowa State University associate sociology professor David Peters Iowa is a split state when it comes to the drug epidemics.

Peters and his co-authors conducted a county-level analysis of death certificates from across the country that noted opioid overdoses as the cause of death. Peters said roughly a quarter of all counties in the United States fall into one of the epidemic categories noted in the study.