The stigma of drug addiction is associated with negative perceptions and can be a barrier to treatment. With the rise in opioid overdose deaths, understanding stigmatizing attitudes towards individuals who use opioids is a crucial matter. There is a lack of opioid use research on stigma and, therefore, we aimed to discern stigmatizing attitudes towards people with opioid addiction. A randomized, between-subjects case vignette study (n = 2605) was conducted with a nation-wide online survey. Participants rated a hypothetical individual addicted to opioids on different dimensions of stigma after seeing one version of a vignette that varied by three conditions: 1) a male versus a female, 2) an individual labeled as being a "drug addict" versus having an "opioid use disorder" and 3) an individual whose use started by taking prescription opioids from a friend versus receiving a prescription from a doctor. Our results indicated that there were higher stigmatizing attitudes overall towards a male, an individual labeled as a "drug addict" and an individual who took prescription opioids from a friend. Interaction effects also showed that a female labeled with an "opioid use disorder" and male labeled as a "drug addict" were rated with higher stigma. The findings from our study are the first to show that information about gender, precipitating events and language matter when assessing stigma and opioid use and may affect the delivery of patient care.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between participants’ sociodemographic characteristics and the degree to which they stigmatize people with an opioid addiction. Methods: A randomized, between-subjects case vignette study (n = 2605) was conducted with a nationwide online survey. We investigated how the stigmatization toward a hypothetical individual who misused prescription opioids differed across participants’ sociodemographic factors (ie, age, gender, education, race, and income). Results: Our results showed that study participants who were male, white, low-income, college graduates, and younger rated the hypothetical individual with an opioid addiction with lower stigma. In addition, we showed that participant gender moderated the relationship between information given about initiation of opioid use (received prescription opioids from a doctor vs took prescription opioids from a friend) and opioid stigma perceptions. Conclusions: Our results support previous findings that stigmatizing attitudes towards drug use vary across participant sociodemographic characteristics. The findings from our study provide a better understanding of how stigmatizing attitudes towards prescription opioid use differ across sociodemographic characteristics and can serve to improve negative perceptions of those with an opioid addiction.

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Objective This study examines how preferences for income redistribution respond to information that points to the degree to which bad luck causes poverty and good luck causes wealth. Methods Survey respondents saw a vignette that described why someone is poor or a vignette that described why someone is wealthy; poverty and wealth were products of effort, various mixtures of effort and luck, one dimension of luck, or two dimensions of luck. Results Overall trends in the data show that redistribution is viewed more favorably as luck becomes marginally more important in causing both poverty and wealth. Pairwise comparisons of specific treatments show that responses to how degrees of bad luck cause poverty are more uniform and predictable than responses to how degrees of good luck cause wealth. Conclusion Redistributive preferences may be more malleable with respect to information that points to how bad luck contributes to poverty.

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