Markets for illicit drugs present an interesting case study for economics, combining non-standard characteristics such as addiction and product illegality. One response has been to argue the generality of economic principles by suggesting that they apply even in the extreme case of markets for...

In 2001, use of the STRIDE data base for the purposes of analyzing drug prices and the impact of public policies on drug markets came under serious attack by the National Research Council (Manski et al., 2001; Horowitz, 2001). While some of the criticisms raised by the committee were valid, many of...

The goals of this chapter are three-fold: (1) to outline some broad empirical regularities concerning how drug problems evolve over time, (2) to sketch some plausible mechanisms for ways in which aspects of that variation might be endogenous, and (3) to review two classes of dynamic models of...