A growing literature has examined how mandatory access prescription drug monitoring programs (MA PDMPs), laws that require providers to consider a patient's prescription history before prescribing controlled substances, affect opioid-related outcomes. However, little is known about their impact...

More than a dozen Federal policy changes since the year 2000 have affected incentives to prescribe, manufacture, and purchase both prescription and illicitly-manufactured opioids. To the extent that one of the policies, the 2013 “Holder memo,” had a meaningful effect on the cost structure of...

With the change in legal status, marijuana is not really being legalized or even just decriminalized. It is being made regulatable or, to coin a phrase, regulatabilized. Markets in illegal goods — along with the goods’ creation, cultivation, distribution, taxation, sale, etc. — are...

The rapid rise in e-cigarette use rates among high school students in the United States is a significant source of public policy concern for many states. This paper is the first study to examine the impact of state tobacco control spending on the demand for vaping products by high school...

Fatal car crashes are a leading cause of death among younger Americans and have become a central concern in the US marijuana policy debate. I provide new evidence on the effect of marijuana on traffic fatalities by exploiting zip code level data on the opening of recreational marijuana...

In the current legal landscape, it is possible to craft policy that combats drug abuse and drug harms, protects human rights, and complies with international drug control law in good faith, by regulating the recreational uses of cannabis products rather than outlawing them. This essay proposes...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused increased drug use and a widespread decline in mental health throughout American society. Yet, despite the unprecedented pandemic, society as a whole has shown an impressive ability to adapt to new ways of living, suggesting that a dramatically different version of...

Conditional on a set population of opioid-dependents, opioid fatalities are a function of the total quantity available and the ease of accessing that quantity. While other studies examine policy changes affecting aggregate supply, I focus on the effects of easing access by changing the trade...

The opioid crisis has implications for firms which must now contend with a lower supply of workers. Consistent with a labor shortage explanation, we find a negative effect of instrumented opioid prescriptions on subsequent individual employment. Similarly, we show a negative relationship between...

Using data on banking transactions, we analyze how people changed their spending behaviour when recreational cannabis became legal in Canada. In the data set, we identify people with purchases in a cannabis store after the legalization. We apply a difference-in-difference approach to compare...

A comprehensive toolkit –for decision-makers, researchers, advocates, and stakeholders– to understand why an appropriate policy address to cannabis is critical if we are to achieve sustainable, resilient, fair, and modern societies. Updated and extended version of the previous progress...

This paper estimates the impact of opioid abuse on real estate prices. We exploit the variation in opioid prescriptions induced by the staggered passage of state laws intending to limit the abuse of opioids. We document a long-term negative relationship between opioid prescriptions and...

An emerging literature considers the role of the opioid crisis on labor outcomes, suggesting that increased access to opioids may have led to decreased national labor supply. This paper uses the introduction of OxyContin and geographic variation in its launch to study the labor supply...

This paper estimates the empirical relationship between the prices of cocaine and heroin and objective indicators of use. The set of outcomes is drug related hospital emergency department admissions where cocaine and heroin are cited, for 21 large U.S. metropolitan areas. These outcomes are...

Background: Whether recreational cannabis legalization is associated with changes in alcohol consumption (suggesting a potential substitution or complementary relationship) is a key question as cannabis policy evolves, particularly given the adverse health and social effects of alcohol use....

Among the many unresolved questions regarding the determinants of violence is the role of prohibitions against drugs and alcohol. Conventional wisdom holds that consumption of these goods encourages violence and that prohibitions discourage such consumption; thus, prohibitions reduce violence....

This paper examines the effect of drug prohibition on the black market prices of cocaine and heroin. The paper examines the ratio of retail to farmgate price for cocaine, heroin, and several legal goods, and it compares legal versus black market prices for cocaine and heroin. The results suggest...

Thirty-six states have legalized medical marijuana and 14 states have legalized the use of marijuana for recreational purposes. In this paper, we review the literature on the public health consequences of legalizing marijuana, focusing on studies that have appeared in economics journals as well...

Recreational cannabis markets possibly increase labor demand through investments in facilities for growing, processing, and retail sales of cannabis, as well as through other industries such as manufacturing, leisure, and hospitality. However, this increase in labor demand may vary substantially...

In order to encourage anti-drug policing, both the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allow police agencies to keep a substantial fraction of assets that they seize in drug arrests. By adjusting their own allocations to police budgets, however, county...

Overdose deaths from prescription opioid pain relievers nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2010, making this the worst drug overdose epidemic in U.S. history. In response, numerous supply-side interventions have aimed to limit access to opioids. However, these supply disruptions may have the...

This article presents estimates of the effects of state prescription opioid policies on prescription opioid sales, mortality and socioeconomic outcomes of adults. Results indicate that state implementation of a “modern” PDMP is associated with decreases in opioid sales of between 5% and 20%...

This paper develops a model of the war against illegal drugs in both producer and consumer countries. The paper studies the trade-off faced by the government of the drug consumer country between prevention policies (aimed at reducing the demand for drugs) and enforcement policies (aimed at...

Since the late 1990s, opioids have been increasingly prescribed for pain treatment in the U.S as a result of aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies. This has resulted in more than 450,000 opioid overdose deaths since then. In the same time period, several U.S. states have legalized...

Canadian household prescription drug expenditures are studied using different years of the Statistics Canada Family Expenditure Survey. Master files are used, expanding the number of available years and permitting provincial rather than regional identifiers. Nonparametric Engel curves are...

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals’ nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using...

Prescription opioid use among women of reproductive age and pregnant women is relatively common and growing prescription opioid use is associated with a commensurate increase in opioid use disorder (OUD) among pregnant women and neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) among infants. In this article,...

This appendix provides complete results for the robustness checks discussed in the paper, Spillover Effects of the Opioid Epidemic on Consumer Finance. The paper available at "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3324709" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3324709

This paper studies the welfare impacts of license quotas in markets for `"sin goods" and how their implementation creates inefficiency. Retail licenses are often geographically restricted rather than allotted to the most efficient areas and may be randomly distributed. To study this allocative...

Drug traffickers sometimes share profits peacefully. Other times they fight. We propose a model to investigate this variation, focusing on the role of the state. Seizing illegal goods can paradoxically increase traffickers' profits, and higher profits fuel violence. Killing kingpins makes crime...

This paper highlights the complex and contested relationship between drugs and development policies globally. It uses a recent experience in Thailand to showcase the link between drugs and development policies while highlighting the difficult international terrain for forging a common United...

The 12th volume of International Development Policy explores the relationship between international drug policy and development goals, both current and within a historical perspective. Contributions address the drugs and development nexus from a range of critical viewpoints, highlighting gaps...

While it is common for United Nations member states in international meetings to espouse ‘public health approaches’ to drug policy, actual policies appear not to have caught up with this rhetoric. There is a lingering over-emphasis in narcotic drug policies on policing and incarceration at...