Drug control policy can have unintended consequences by pushing existing users to alternative, possibly more dangerous substances. Policies that target only new users may therefore be especially promising. Using commercial insurance claims data, we provide the first evidence on a set of new...

Prior work considers effects of prescribing restrictions on opioid use but not upstream implications for pharmaceutical marketing activities, despite the inordinate role many believe marketing played in the crisis. Our study proposes a stylized model of pharmaceutical payments and investigates...

This paper examines the effect of restricting opioid prescription on homelessness. We assess this relationship by exploiting plausible exogenous variation in prescribed opioid supply derived from an opioid restriction policy: the hydrocodone rescheduling. We identified the causal effect of this...

Thirty-four states have adopted medical marijuana laws and ten states have adopted recreational marijuana laws. There is little research comparing how these two types of laws affect drug consumption. Using a difference in difference strategy, we find that recreational laws increase past-year...