Date of Award

1-1-2021

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Economics

Content Description

1 online resource (ix, 104 pages) : color illustrations, color maps.

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Pinka Chatterji

Committee Members

Chun-yu Ho, Baris Yoruk

Keywords

Medical Marijuana, Medicare Part D, Opioid, PDMP, Drug monitoring, Drugs, Marijuana, Opioid abuse, Marijuana abuse, Medication abuse, Drug legalization

Subject Categories

Economics

Abstract

Opium and less potent substances such as tobacco and marijuana were found thousands of years ago and used not only to relieve pain and stress but also to entertain human minds. However, there are also side effects of using these, especially to the extent of abusing them. The side effects in this issue are unavoidable so that eliminate them through public health policies is needed. There are several public policies governing the impact of opioids and marijuana in recent years, mainly the Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMP) and the Legalization of Marijuana. These policies have been in place for about a decade ago and continued to be implement in more states across the United States. There are three parts in this paper. In the first part, we visit the impact of PDMP in case of New York state which implemented the policies in the middle of the wave of implementing such policy. We found no clear evidence of the impact of PDMP on New York State’s overdose death rate and legal retail sale of opioids. In the second Chapter, we tried to expand our analysis to include other PDMP implementing states. Leveraging the richness of the Medicare Part D data where we can observe individual prescribers’ react to the PDMPs, we measured the impact of PDMP policy at different angles including high volume prescriber, prescribers in high overdose death rate area, prescribers with different credential and practicing in different specialties. We are interested in a more detail searching for the effectiveness of the program. In the last Chapter, we address public health policy in the case of legalizing marijuana. Most of our findings are consistent with those of earlier literatures related to opioid prescribing outcomes, retail distribution and substance abuse treatment. However, we provided insights into the different impacts of the policies to different groups of prescribers regarding their practicing geographic, specialties and their quality of training and education. We also found that in reducing the legal opioid prescriptions, the legalization of marijuana laws seems to have stronger intended impact than the PDMPs.

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