Differential Associations Between Increasing Opioid Withdrawal Symptoms and More Frequent Methamphetamine Use, US, 2022-2023.

BACKGROUND: Methamphetamine is increasingly co-used with opioids. This is a worrisome combination that complicates addiction disease severity, increases overdose risk, exacerbates comorbidities, and strains the national healthcare system. Growing evidence suggests that some people co-use methamphetamine and opioids to temporarily relieve painful opioid withdrawal symptoms. A national epidemiologic profile of how, and for whom, opioid withdrawal may influence increased methamphetamine use is needed to inform interventions.

METHODS: We used the National Survey of Drug Use and Health to identify individuals who used both methamphetamine and opioids in the past year (pooled 2022-2023; N = 572; weighted N = 1,494,223). Our outcome was the number of days a person reported using methamphetamine in the past year (1-365), predicted by the number of past-year opioid withdrawal symptoms (0-10). We used Poisson regression to model the number of methamphetamine days and included an interaction term between opioid withdrawal and race/ethnicity. We applied survey weights to obtain unbiased US population estimates.

RESULTS: The mean weighted number of methamphetamine days was 160, and the mean weighted opioid withdrawal sum score was 2.9 out of 10. For every increase in opioid withdrawal sum score, the rate of methamphetamine days increased 20% faster for Black individuals compared to White individuals (interaction p < .01).

CONCLUSION: Despite reporting relatively infrequent methamphetamine use overall, our model predicted that Black individuals with high opioid withdrawal symptoms had an estimated 300 annual days using methamphetamine. We frame our findings around racial disparities and posit that access to opioid treatment may uniquely influence methamphetamine behavior for Black individuals.