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The Opioid Crisis in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of news about the opioid crisis from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about opioids, fentanyl, heroin or drug overdose, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, the opioid crisis took 18.63 of every 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 10.03 in 2025, a 46.2% fall in its share of news coverage.
Basis: Annual articles matching opioid and overdose vocabulary (157,758 articles in 2019–2025) divided by all articles in the index for the same year.
The opioid crisis took a 49.4% smaller share of news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (9.43 against 18.63 articles per 10,000 news articles), the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Basis: Annual opioid-crisis articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year.
August 2019, the month in which an Oklahoma court ruled on the state's opioid lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, was the month in which the opioid crisis took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 22.93 articles per 10,000.
Basis: Monthly opioid-crisis articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Of opioid-crisis articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 72.9% were negative in tone, 2.17 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.8% of sampled articles carry a label.
Training in naloxone (Narcan) administration appeared in 8.93% of themed opioid-crisis articles between January 2023 and July 2026, 457.07 times its frequency in all themed news.
Basis: Theme labels assigned to each article; lift against all themed news.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 30,115 | 71.0% | 1.47 |
| India | 4,149 | 9.78% | 0.74 |
| Canada | 1,450 | 3.42% | 1.59 |
| United Kingdom | 1,427 | 3.36% | 0.58 |
| Australia | 680 | 1.6% | 0.75 |
| China | 517 | 1.22% | 0.46 |
| Mexico | 433 | 1.02% | 3.3 |
| Pakistan | 393 | 0.93% | 2.04 |
| Ireland | 259 | 0.61% | 0.85 |
| Nigeria | 213 | 0.5% | 0.37 |
| Singapore | 146 | 0.34% | 0.39 |
| France | 143 | 0.34% | 0.17 |
| Japan | 112 | 0.26% | 0.25 |
| Myanmar | 108 | 0.25% | 7.86 |
| Germany | 105 | 0.25% | 0.21 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "opioid" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. The Opioid Crisis in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/opioid-crisis/