Must access laws for opioid prescription and county gross domestic product: evidence from the US

ABSTRACT

We estimate the impact of must access laws on county-level GDP. Specifically, we exploit the variation in must access law between neighbouring counties across state border during 2010 and 2016. To curb the misuse of opioids, states have implemented Prescription Drug Monitoring Programmes (PDMPs), a system accessible to authorized prescribers and/or dispensers to check a patient’s opioid prescription history. A stricter type of PDMP is the ‘must access’ law that requires access to the state’s PDMP system before prescribing or dispensing opioids. We find that a county with must access law had a 3.7% higher real GDP than the neighbouring county across state border without must access law. Extending recent studies on health and labour market impact of prescription opioids, and with opioid epidemic declared a public health emergency, the findings have implications for policymakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Opioid prescription
• county GDP
• PDMP
• must access law

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I12
• I18
• J20

Acknowledgments

We thank Carl Bonham, Robert Kaestner, and Association of University Business and Economic Research (AUBER) 2019 conference session participants for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.