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,...

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...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

Many states have passed laws to limit the supply of prescription opioids in response to the opioid crisis. Prominent among these laws are Prescription Drug Monitoring programs (PDMPs) and Pain Medicine Clinic Laws or Pill ”Mill” Laws (PMLs). PDMPs provide an avenue for medical professionals...

With the change in legal status, marijuana is not really being legalized or even just decriminalized. It is being made regulatable or, to coin a phrase, regulatabilized. Markets in illegal goods — along with the goods’ creation, cultivation, distribution, taxation, sale, etc. — are...

From April 2020 through at least the end of 2021, Americans died from non-Covid causes at an average annual rate 97,000 in excess of previous trends. Hypertension and heart disease deaths combined were elevated 32,000. Diabetes or obesity, drug-induced causes, and alcohol-induced causes were...

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...

This study examines the effects of U.S. state-level marijuana policies on mental health. Using data from three nationally representative data sets and estimating difference-in-differences models that account for the staggered implementation of both medical and recreational marijuana legislation,...