In 2013, Kentucky, Rhode Island, and Nevada had some of the highest rates of death from opioid overdoses, and they also had some of the country’s highest unemployment rates. A series of studies suggests that this joblessness might have been—at least in part—contributing to the high rates of drug addiction.
A National Bureau of Economic Research paper I wrote about a few months ago found that as the unemployment rate increases by 1 percentage point in a given county, the opioid-death rate rises by 3.6 percent, and emergency-room visits rise by 7 percent. Now, a new meta-analysis lends further evidence to the idea that when people lose their jobs, they are more likely to turn to illegal drug use.
[For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/he...-to-drug-use/534087/]
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