More than 564,000 Americans have died from an opioid-related overdose since 1999. In this paper, I estimate the impacts of enforcement actions taken against doctors on the supply of prescription opioids, black-market prices, and health outcomes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the...

Drug trafficking has created many problems for the Central Asian republics and caused significanthuman and financial losses. The high profit and prosperity of this trade have caused terrorist and extremist religious groups in this region to move in this direction to consolidate their power and...

We study the moral hazard effects of the drug copayment threshold in Finland using detailed prescription drug purchase data. The analysis reveals that the average drug costs increase discontinuously by 17% at the threshold above which out-of-pocket drug costs decrease substantially. Our results...

We study the moral hazard effects of the drug copayment threshold in Finland using detailed prescription drug purchase data. The analysis reveals that the average drug costs increase discontinuously by 17% at the threshold above which out-of-pocket drug costs decrease substantially. Our results...

Classic treatments of both the opium industry and the international drug trade tend to leave out Mexico’s opium production. Yet the industry, which emerged in the 1920s, both fulfilled U.S. demands and shaped the Mexican narcotics trade.

Cocaine trafficking has a significant but understudied influence on Central American economies. The economic implications of this trade have repercussions for both regional development and drug control policy debates, and therefore deserve greater attention. Towards that end, in this paper we...

Multiple transformations-referred to as "waves" in a panoply of recent public health and law enforcement publications-have rendered North American drug markets increasingly toxic since the early 2010s. The introduction of exceptionally potent synthetic sedatives and stimulants is initiating a...

There have been more than 500,000 opioid overdose deaths since 2000. To analyze the opioid epidemic, we construct a model where individuals, with and without pain, choose whether to misuse opioids knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of opioid use. Markov...

Drawing on a discursive analysis of the life stories of thirty-three men who worked in drug trade organisations in Mexico, this article examines how masculinities are constructed in their narratives, and how these constructions mirror militarised masculinities implicit in official discourses of...

Despite the well-documented human costs of the war on drugs, and the growing evidence of the environmental impacts of illicit economies, the militarized repression of the illicit drug trade remains a central hemispheric security and cooperation strategy in Northern and Central American...

This study examines the effects of U.S. state-level marijuana policies on mental health. Using data from three nationally representative data sets and estimating difference-in-differences models that account for the staggered implementation of both medical and recreational marijuana legislation,...

This paper used publicly available data, such as the analysis of 103 court cases to make a profile of those convicted for cannabis cultivation in Albania. There are multiple reports on drugs and organized crime in Albania which provide information on the seizures of illicit substances, law...

State-level marijuana legalization has unintended consequences, including its effect on fertility. Marijuana use is associated with behaviors that increase fertility as well as physical changes that lower fertility. In this paper, I use a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation...

The opioid crisis in the United States has resulted in a dramatic increase in overdose deaths in the last two decades. This crisis has created an economic ripple that has affected an important engine of growth: research and development (R&D). Using patent data from the United States Patent and...

Marijuana taxation is here to stay. The evergreen issues for states, before federal complications, are how much, how, and where to tax marijuana. But federal legalization could create a new, competing federal tax and eliminate the controversial section 280E selling expense tax, to which many...

Honduras has been Central America’s focal point for drug trafficking towards the United States for years as the region’s main transit country. Recent court cases held in the United States have revealed the symbiotic relationship between state actors, business elites and drug trafficking...

The aim of this policy commentary is two-fold. First, to examine new historical research regarding the political, cultural, and social drivers informing the design and implementation of Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’ - a set of state policies centered on punitive and militarized responses towards...

Marijuana prohibition ended in Canada in 2018 when marijuana was legalized at the federal level. Marijuana prohibition in the United States has de factor ended in a large percentage of states as marijuana has been legalized at the state level (even while it remains illegal under federal law)....

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...

As part of a Nixon-era set of reforms, the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) was not intended to be a harsh, punitive approach but in the intervening years, the CSA lost its original purpose as political winds changed in ways that focused more on punitive approaches to drug control. Moreover, the...

Incarceration is a crucial part of the scholarly analysis of crime, but what happens inside penal institutions largely remains a 'black box' (Western, 2021). This paper studies the impact of the new psychoactive substances (NPS) epidemic within prisons. NPS are powerful addictive chemical...

We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA's introduction...

There is scarce empirical evidence on the impacts of drug consumption decriminalization, especially, on problematic drug use and violence. In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the consumption of all illicit drugs. In this paper, we focus on determining the short, medium, and long-term impact of...

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...

Many pharmaceutical drugs have multiple indications, for which they offer a varying degree of benefit for patients. Yet, in the current US pricing system, the price of the drug is the same regardless of the indication for which it is prescribed. This uniform pricing policy can deter the payer...

We study how internal migration responds to an increase in criminal violence in the context of Mexico’s 2007 War on Drugs. In order to identify causal effects, we exploit the changes in homicides generated by conflict between drug-trafficking organizations. Instrumental variable regressions...

Drug patents are distorted. Unlike most other inventors, drug inventors must complete years of testing to the government’s specifications and seek government approval to commercialize their inventions. All the while, the patent term runs. When a drug inventor finally launches a medicine that...

Can individuals' aversion to drug markets curb the benefits of decriminalization? We investigate the effect of two policies on housing demand in the Netherlands: the distance-to-school criterion, which closed some cannabis shops in a few cities; and the zero-tolerance policy, which banned shops...

Drug patents are distorted. Unlike most other inventors, drug inventors must complete years of testing to the government’s specifications and seek government approval to commercialize their inventions. All the while, the patent term runs. When a drug inventor finally launches a medicine that...

In medicine today, we face an innovation paradox. The companies that develop new medicines are highly dependent on a period of exclusive marketing after approval, to fund their research and development programs. But longer research and development programs are not associated with longer periods...

The discourse about illicit financial flows (IFFs) repeatedly stresses promoting development and equality in the world, but the links between them are much more difficult to ascertain. As defined in relation to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16, the concept of what is illicit rests on...