When innovation goes wrong: technological regress and the opioid epidemic

Author / Creator

Cutler, David M

Available as

Online

Summary

The fivefold increase in opioid deaths between 2000 and 2017 rivals even the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis for America. Why did it happen? Measures of demand for pain relief - physical pain ...

The fivefold increase in opioid deaths between 2000 and 2017 rivals even the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis for America. Why did it happen? Measures of demand for pain relief - physical pain and despair - are high but largely unchanging. The primary shift is in supply, primarily of new forms of allegedly safer narcotics. These new pain relievers flowed mostly to areas with more pain, but since their apparent safety was an illusion, opioid deaths followed. By the end of the 2000s, restrictions on legal opioids led to further supply-side innovations which created the burgeoning illegal market that accounts for the bulk of opioid deaths today. Because opioid use is easier to start than end, America's opioid epidemic is likely to persist for some time.

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