Background: Nowadays Bulgarian population is facing a number of challenges: economic crisis, demographic ageing and bad general health status. The global burden of mental disorders can be assessed in four ways: prevalence, burden, inequities in the distribution and their impact on other health...

We use unique survey data linked to nearly a decade of administrative welfare data to examine the relationship between early marijuana use (at age 14 or younger) and young people's educational outcomes. We find evidence that early marijuana use is related to educational penalties that are...

Three months into the COVID-19 outbreak caused by a novel strain of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the world is still in search of an effective therapeutic drug. Experimental drugs developed for other infections, such as Gilead's remdesivir, have been repurposed with unclear success. A recent small...

Governments worldwide are increasingly concerned about the booming CBD (cannabidiol) products. However, little is known about the impact of their liberalization. We study a unique case of unintended liberalization of a CBD-based product (light cannabis) that occurred in Italy in 2017. Using...

The spillover effect of cigarette taxes on youth marijuana use has been the subject of intense public debate. Opponents of cigarette taxes warn that tax hikes will cause youths to substitute toward marijuana. On the other hand, public health experts often claim that because tobacco is a...

The United States has recently — and belatedly — come to recognize opioid addiction as a public health crisis. What has gone mostly unrecognized is the degree to which this crisis is intertwined with U.S. intellectual property law and related elements of U.S. innovation policy. Innovation...

We investigate the effect of variations in the price of opium in Afghanistan on per capita dispensation of prescription opioids in the US. Quarterly county-level data for 2003-2016 indicate that reductions in opium prices significantly increase the quantity of opioids prescribed. The increase...

This paper studies the effects of marijuana legalization on neighborhood crime using unique geospatial data from Denver, Colorado. We construct a highly local panel data set that includes changes in the location of marijuana dispensaries and changes in neighborhood crime. To account for...

We examine the early effects of U.S. state Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on substance use disorder (SUD) treatment utilization. We couple administrative data on admissions to specialty SUD treatment and prescriptions for medications used to treat SUDs in outpatient...

In year 1991 regional governments in Spain started a period of implementation of a law that rose the Minimum Legal Drinking Age from 16 to 18 years old. This process was fully completed in year 2015. To evaluate the effects of this change on consumption of legal drugs and its related morbidity...