Naloxone is a life-saving medication which helps reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. Improving naloxone access is a central pillar of the federal response to the worsening opioid crisis in the United States. Existing studies have evaluated the effects of state naloxone access laws,...

This paper studies the impact of legal medical marijuana markets on the decision to quit marijuana use, distinguishing between de jure legalization, in which dispensaries are legally protected, and de facto legalization, where dispensaries operate in the absence of laws protecting them....

Large and rapid upswings in illicit drug use display similar properties to infectious disease epidemics. In this chapter, we review research to understand what causes drug epidemics and how they end. Drug market actors are subject to both positive and negative reinforcement that lead to rapid,...

Recent evidence suggests that the short-term transition of the opioid crisis from prescription opioids to heroin can be attributed to the reformulation of OxyContin, which substantially reduced access to abusable prescription opioids. In this paper, we find that over a longer time horizon,...

Drug overdoses involving opioid analgesics have increased dramatically since 1999, representing one of the United States' top public health crises. Opioids have legitimate medical functions, but improving access may increase abuse rates even among those not prescribed the drugs given that...

Recent studies have shown that efforts to curb alcohol use by increasing the price of alcohol and limiting youth's access have succeeded, but they may have had the unintended consequencce of increasing marijuana use. This possibility is troubling in light of a recent government report that shows...

Nationally representative studies consistently report significant gender and racial differences in youth smoking rates, although little research has been done to explain why. In this paper we examine one possible source for this variation: differences in youth responsiveness to changes in price...

Over the last two decades, there has been a surge of opioid-related overdose deaths resulting in a myriad of state policy responses. Researchers have evaluated the effectiveness of such policies using a wide-range of statistical models, each of which requires multiple design choices that can...

Despite efforts to address the opioid crisis, opioid-related overdoses remain a significant contributor to mortality. State efforts to reduce overdose deaths by removing barriers to naloxone have recently focused on pharmacy channels, but the specifics of these laws and the contexts in which...

This research analyzes the contemporaneous and intertemporal relationship between the demands for alcohol and marijuana by youths and young adults. A general theory of multi-commodity habit formation is developed and tested using data from the 1983-1984 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey...