Assessing the impact of drug courts on provider-directed marketing efforts by manufactures of medications for the treatment of opioid use disorder

Abstract

Background: Opioid use disorder (OUD) has become an increasingly consequential public health concern, especially in the United States where 47,600 opioid overdose deaths occurred in 2017 (Scholl, Seth, Kariisa, Wilson, & Baldwin, 2019). Medications for OUD (MOUD) are effective for decreasing opioid-related morbidity and mortality, including within the criminal justice system (Hedrich et al., 2012; Medications for Opioid Use Disorder Save Lives, 2019; Moore et al., 2019).While a stronger evidence base exists for agonist MOUD than for antagonist MOUD, a national study of drug courts found that half prohibited agonist MOUD (Matusow et al., 2013).Furthermore, recent media reports suggest that the pharmaceutical manufacturer of an antagonist MOUD has marketed its product towards drug court judges (Goodnough & Zernike, 2017; Harper, 2017). However, no study to date has systematically examined the relationship between MOUD marketing practices and drug courts. This ecological study examines the association at the county level between MOUD manufacturer payments to prescribers and drug court locations.

Method: We extracted provider-directed payments from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)'s Sunshine Act Open Payments data 2014-2017, isolating those records mentioning any MOUD. We compared provider-directed payments for two major MOUDs: buprenorphine and extended-release naltrexone, in counties with and without drug courts.

Results: The presence of any adult drug courts in the county is associated with a 7.86 percentage-point increase in the likelihood of providers in that county receiving any MOUD-related payments (about 22.46% of the sample mean, p<0.001) and with a 10.70% increase in the amount of these payments per 1000 county residents (p<0.001). The association between other forms of drug courts such as juvenile drug courts and Driving-Under-the-Influence courts (DUI) courts are less significant and slightly smaller in magnitude compared to those of adult drug courts. We did not find significant difference between payments by the manufacturer of Vivitrol and manufacturers of Zubsolv, Bunavail, and Suboxone (oral forms of buprenorphine).

Conclusions: Our results show an ecological association at the county level between MOUD manufacturer payments to prescribers and drug court presence. However, we did not examine a causal association between these variables.