Previous research suggests that state Medicaid expansions implemented under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) helped large numbers of patients suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) gain access to life-saving medications, including buprenorphine. However, Medicaid expansions...

Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD) consists of administering methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone in conjunction with behavioral therapy. Despite strong support in the medical and public health communities for MAT, fewer than 10 percent of US patients with...

Using administrative records of Medicaid enrollees in Rhode Island that link their health-care information with their payroll employment records, this paper produces new stylized facts concerning the association between opioid use disorder (OUD) and employment and inquires as to whether...

21 states and the District of Columbia currently have laws that permit marijuana use for medical purposes, often termed medical marijuana laws (MMLs). We tested the effects of MMLs adopted in seven states between 2004 and 2011 on adolescent and adult marijuana, alcohol, and hard drug use. We...

We examine the effect of increasing the substance use disorder (SUD) treatment rate on reducing violent and property crime rates, based on county-level panels of SUD treatment and crime data between 2001 and 2008 across the United States. To address the potential endogeneity of the SUD treatment...

This paper uses the all-payer claims database (APCD) for Rhode Island to study three questions about the use of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder (OUD): (1) Does MAT reduce the risk of opioid overdose; (2) are there systematic differences in the uptake of MAT by...

Using administrative records of Medicaid enrollees in Rhode Island that link their health-care information with their payroll employment records, this paper produces new stylized facts concerning the association between opioid use disorder (OUD) and employment and inquires as to whether...