Poverty & The Opioid Epidemic

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Last year I read Cherry by Nico Walker - an autobiographical account of a man who goes from college student, to soldier in the Iraq war, to heroin addict and bank robber. The fact that so many people have enlisted and fought in an utterly purposeless conflict because, as the narrator puts it, “what else were they gonna do?” stuck with me. I initially wanted to map the intersection of the Iraq War and the opioid epidemic in impoverished, post-industrial communities. After digging through data, I realized that, while these connections are very real, they are difficult to translate graphically. The other aspect of the story – poverty – is very clear to display and more appropriate to map. I knew that I needed to give context to the data because so often we lose the human connection when the only thing telling the story is colors on a map. One of my design concerns was to be sensitive to the subject but to not overly “showy” about the real misery experienced by so many in our country. I felt that over-designing the map would be inappropriate. The assignment was to create a choropleth map, and I think I told a story with this map that I haven’t seen told very often.

This was created for an assignment in Geography 370 - Intro to Cartography - UW-Madison.
All design work and styling was done in Adobe Illustrator.
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