Sally Satel | Politico
As Congress prepares to pass legislation addressing the opioid crisis, it is imperative for policymakers to understand the reality of opioid abuse.
Roger Bate | AEIdeas
At AEI's event this week on the opioid crisis, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) talked about China making fentanyl for export to kill Americans. While this plays into the ongoing, multilayered US versus China battle, it is also rather more complicated.
Roger Bate | AEIdeas
China has agreed to ramp up efforts to prevent unauthorized fentanyl sales to the United States, but that probably won't be enough to solve the problem in the long term.
Roger Bate | AEI Economic Perspectives
Original research of online sellers in China and surveying drug users and dealers in the Philadelphia area leads to the inevitable conclusion that fentanyl use has exploded over the past two years, and with it has come a significant increase in fatal overdoses.
Robert Doar | AEIdeas
Last week, the Senate passed a bill containing several measures meant to combat the opioid crisis. Robert Doar argues that perhaps the most important achievement of the bill is the provision for a grant program that would provide job training, housing, and health care to those attempting to overcome their addiction. People with substance abuse disorders need care and temporarily comprehensive assistance, but they also benefit from getting back into regular work. Doar believes that work provides a routine, a sense of purpose, and camaraderie with coworkers and can keep recovering substance abusers from relapsing. These changes, coupled with state-level reforms to limit the widespread prescription of potentially dangerous drugs, should bring about some progress in the fight against opioids.
The geographic variation in the cost of the opioid crisis
Alex Brill and Scott Ganz | AEI Economics Working Paper Series
As the opioid epidemic worsens in the United States, the toll it imposes on the US economy has risen to staggering heights. Alex Brill and Scott Ganz estimate per capita state-level and county-level non-mortality and total economic burdens of the opioid crisis in 2015 by distributing national estimates based on variation in local wages, health care costs, and criminal justice costs; variation in opioid-related death and addiction rates; and average age-adjusted value of statistical lives lost. Their findings indicate that among the lower 48 states in 2015, per capita non-mortality costs were highest in the District of Columbia ($493) and New Hampshire ($360). Median per capita non-mortality costs were $205 in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Per capita total costs (including mortality costs) were highest in West Virginia ($4,378) and the District of Columbia ($3,657). Median per capita total costs were $1,672 in Nevada.