I love dragging on bad science reporting as much as anyone, but I must give All Of The Credit to the Washington Post and its excellent, data-centered reporting on the opioid epidemic . It is a thing of beauty. How to use in class: 1) Broadly, this is a fine example of using data to better understand applied problems, medical problems, drug problems, etc. 2) Specifically, this data can be personalized to your locale via WaPo's beautiful, functional website . 3) After you pull up you localized data, descriptive data abound...# of pills, who provided them, who wrote the scripts (y'all...Frontier Pharmacy is like two miles from my house)... 4) Everyone teaches about frequency tables, right? Here is a good example: 5) In addition to localizing this research via the WaPo website, you can also personalize your class by looking for local reporting that uses this data. For instance, the Erie newspaper reporter David Bruce reported on our local problem ( .pdf of the...
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