Over the past two decades deaths from opioids and other drugs have grown to be a major U.S. population health problem, but the magnitude of the crisis varies across the U.S., and explanations for widespread geographic variation in the severity of the drug crisis are limited. An emerging debate...

There is evidence that physicians disproportionately suffer from substance use disorder and mental health problems. It is not clear, however, whether these phenomena are causal. We use data on Dutch medical school applicants to examine the effects of becoming a physician on prescription drug use...

Biologic drugs represent an important category of drugs that improve health outcomes in this country. Yet, these cutting-edge drugs are often prohibitively costly, preventing access for many Americans. Recognizing the need for more affordable, generic substitutes for biologic drugs — or...

Background: The HIV epidemic in Pakistan is at present concentrated among high-risk groups including IDUs. Pakistan has approx. 75 000 IDUs - 12 300 are living in Karachi. The HIV prevalence rate among the IDUs in Karachi is 26%. During 2005 and 2006 Pakistan Society, an NGO working for...

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...

There is significant interest in understanding the labor market consequences of the opioid epidemic, but little is known about how opioid use impacts on-the-job productivity. We analyze the impact of opioid initiation in the emergency department (ED) on workforce outcomes in the Military using...

The U.S. opioid crisis is now driven by fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that currently accounts for 90% of all opioid deaths. Fentanyl is smuggled from abroad, with little evidence on how this happens. We show that a substantial amount of fentanyl smuggling occurs via legal trade flows,...

The study analyses, empirically, the efficiency of the Pharmaceutical sector in Nigeria. Employing a balanced panel of 20 pharmaceutical firms between 2012 and 2016, the paper uses a non-parametric technique (Data Envelopment Analysis) to analyze the firms' efficiency under the constant returns...

The study analyses, empirically, the efficiency of the Pharmaceutical sector in Nigeria. Employing a balanced panel of 20 pharmaceutical firms between 2012 and 2016, the paper uses a non-parametric technique (Data Envelopment Analysis) to analyze the firms' efficiency under the constant returns...

Considerable resources have been spent on estimating the size of populations of people who use drugs (PWUD) and people who inject drugs (PWID) in Africa. Precise estimates are elusive, not least because of stigma and criminalization faced by these populations. Bio-behavioral surveys focused on...