With great pleasure we announce the 2024 winner of the Excellence in Drug Policy Research. This recognizes a highly significant piece of research that was published between 2021 and 2023.
The winning study is Alpert, Abby, William N. Evans, Ethan MJ Lieber, and David Powell. “Origins of the opioid crisis and its enduring impacts.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 137, no. 2 (2022): 1139-1179.
The paper examines the role of the 1996 introduction and marketing of OxyContin as a potential leading cause of the US opioid crisis. On the one hand it shows the importance of state level controls, namely the triplicate prescription programs. On the other, it shows the deleterious effect of Purdue Pharma marketing of its powerful opioid. Recently-unsealed court documents involving Purdue Pharma show that state-based triplicate prescription programs posed a major obstacle to sales of OxyContin. These documents suggest that less marketing was targeted to states with these programs; OxyContin distribution was about 50% lower in “triplicate states” in the years after the launch. While triplicate states had higher rates of overdose deaths prior to 1996, this relationship flipped shortly after the launch and triplicate states saw substantially slower growth in overdose deaths, continuing even twenty years after OxyContin’s introduction. These results show that the introduction and marketing of OxyContin explain a substantial share of overdose deaths over the last two decades.
The committee was impressed by the careful and ingenious use of multiple data sources as well as the rigorous modeling. Most of all, the study reflected a thoughtful analysis of the interaction between policy interventions and corporate strategy.
The 2024 awards committee consisted of:
- Peter Reuter (University of Maryland)
- Alison Ritter (University of New South Wales)
- Alex Stevens (University of Kent)
