The fivefold increase in opioid deaths between 2000 and 2017 rivals even the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis for America. Why did it happen? Measures of demand for pain relief - physical pain and despair - are high but largely unchanging. The primary shift is in supply, primarily of new...

Opioid overdose death rates in the United States have risen continuously for over three decades, increasing 2,142 percent in total from 1990 to 2020. This is surprising. One might expect drug epidemics to be self-limiting, as policy and individual behavior reacts to observed deaths. We study why...