Confronting America's Opioid Crisis: Measuring the Impacts of State Laws on Opioid Misuse

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
This paper offers some of the first long-run evidence on important laws addressing America's opioid crisis. Naloxone access laws make the opioid-overdose antidote naloxone more widely available; drug-overdose Good Samaritan laws provide legal immunity to overdose victims and witnesses. I exploit the staggered introduction of these laws across states as well as differences among the same type of law. Enactment of both laws is followed by a 4% increase in illicit drug use. Good Samaritan laws are associated with significantly fewer subsequent opioid deaths, while the effect of naloxone laws is negligible. Naloxone laws are associated with more opioid-related emergency room visits, while Good Samaritan laws are associated with fewer visits. These findings suggest that naloxone and Good Samaritan laws may encourage opioid use.

Description

Type of resource text
Date created May 3, 2018

Creators/Contributors

Author Holderness, George Clifford
Primary advisor Einav, Liran
Degree granting institution Stanford University, Department of Economics

Subjects

Subject Department of Economics
Subject opioid
Subject drug overdose
Subject naloxone
Subject good samaritan
Subject risk compensation
Genre Thesis

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User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).

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Preferred Citation
Holderness, George Clifford. 2018. "Confronting America's Opioid Crisis: Measuring the Impacts of State Laws on Opioid Misuse." Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/yt609qd6967

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Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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