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...

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...

We examine how deaths and emergency department (ED) visits related to use of opioid analgesics (opioids) and other drugs vary with macroeconomic conditions. As the county unemployment rate increases by one percentage point, the opioid death rate per 100,000 rises by 0.19 (3.6%) and the opioid...

This analysis utilizes death certificate data from the Multiple Cause of Death (MCOD) files to better measure the specific drugs involved in drug poisoning fatalities. Statistical adjustment procedures are used to provide more accurate estimates, accounting for the understatement in death...

The United States is in the midst of a fatal drug epidemic. This study uses data from the Multiple Cause of Death Files to examine the extent to which increases in county-level drug mortality rates from 1999-2015 are due to “deaths of despair”, measured here by deterioration in medium-run...