Preventive medicine
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Preventive medicine · Feb 2025
Passive exposure to opioid crisis information and public attitudes: Effects on local policy support, discrimination, and stigma in a United States national survey.
To examine associations between passive exposure to opioid crisis information and public attitudes toward opioid use disorder (OUD) policies and stigma among United States (US) adults. ⋯ Despite widespread media coverage of the opioid crisis, passive information exposure was only associated with increased support for local, not national, harm-reduction policies. The modest exposure rate (59.4 %) suggests an attention gap between information availability and public engagement. The differential effectiveness of information channels suggests that communication strategies emphasizing community-level initiatives and leveraging specific sources like healthcare providers and interpersonal networks may be particularly important for building public support for evidence-based OUD prevention policies.