At last, a convincing explanation for America’s drug-death crisis

It is hard to overstate the impact of America’s fentanyl epidemic. The synthetic opioid and its close chemical relatives were involved in about 70% of the country’s 110,000 overdose deaths in 2022. They are now almost certainly the biggest killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49. Every 14 months or so America loses more people to fentanyl than it has lost in all of its wars combined since the second world war, from Korea to Afghanistan.Perhaps it seems odd to look to economics for insights about how to manage a crisis which is more naturally the domain of public health, but economists’ research methods are well-suited to examining the problem. It is thus regrettable that the discipline has had little to say about fentanyl. A review of 150 economic studies in 2022 included just two that were focused on the drug.