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The Impact of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs on U.S. Opioid Prescriptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Ian Ayres  and
Amen Jalal
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Extract

This paper seeks to understand the treatment effect of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) on opioid prescription rates. Using county-level panel data on all opioid prescriptions in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015, we investigate whether state interventions like PDMPs have heterogeneous treatment effects at the sub-state level, based on regional and temporal variations in policy design, extent of urbanization, race, and income. Our models comprehensively control for a set of county and time fixed effects, countyspecific and time-varying demographic controls, potentially endogenous time-series trends in prescription rates, and other state-level opioid interventions such as Naloxone Access and Good Samaritan laws, Medicaid expansion, and the provision of Methadone Assistance Treatment. We find that PDMPs are only effective in reducing prescription rates if they obligate doctors to check for patients' history prior to filling out a prescription, but the frequency at which a state requires its PDMP to be updated is irrelevant to its effectiveness. Moreover, the significant treatment effects of PDMPs are almost exclusively driven by urban and predominantly white counties, with the relatively more affluent regions showing greater responsiveness than their less affluent counterparts.

Type
Symposium Articles
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Law and the Opioid Crisis: An Inter-Disciplinary Examination , Summer 2018 , pp. 387 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2018

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