The international drug control structures, the UN drug control conventions and drug policy in Austria. On Friday 9th and Saturday 10th March 2012, the South East Europe Drug Policy Network (SEE Network) held its annual meeting in Vienna, Austria. The programme of the meeting focused on the...

The US is currently in the midst of the worst drug overdose epidemic in its history, with nearly 64,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016. In response, pharmaceutical companies have begun introducing abuse-deterrent painkillers, pills with properties that make the drug more difficult to misuse. The...

Mortality due to opioid overdoses has been growing rapidly in the U.S., with some states experiencing much steeper increases than others. Legalizing medical cannabis could reduce opioid-related mortality if potential opioid users substitute towards cannabis as a safer alternative. I show,...

Statistical methods that shrink parameters towards zero can produce lower predictive variance than does maximum likelihood. This paper discusses an approach to doing this for age-period-cohort models, and applies it to fitting opioid mortality rates with a generalization of the Lee-Carter model...

Opioid abuse is currently the most significant public health problem in the US. Many US states have implemented prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) in response. In this paper, I use a new micro-level medical claims database to exploit state-level and time-series variations in PDMP...

This paper provides an empirical test of the rational addiction model, used in economics to model individuals’ consumption of addictive substances, versus the utility misprediction model, used in psychology to explain the discrepancy between people’s decision and their subsequent...

More than half of the US population lives in a state that has adopted medical marijuana laws (MMLs). Studies show that most medical marijuana patients use marijuana for managing their pain with the overwhelming majority of them preferring it to opioids. Despite ongoing pro-marijuana policies and...

Problem Definition: To approve a novel drug therapy, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires clinical trial evidence demonstrating efficacy with 2.5% statistical significance, although the agency often uses regulatory discretion when interpreting these standards. Factors including...

This paper examines the evolution of drug use in Colombia over the past years. Our analysis, based on surveys from the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes, shows that drug consumption grew substantially between 1996 and 2013. The growth occurred for both genders, all ages, socioeconomic...