Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices
A county’s fraction of adults in 1990 on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is a strong predictor of growth in local drug death rates after 2000. The part of the SSDI rate related to drug deaths is not proxying for well-known contributors to the drug crisis, e.g. OxyContin. Instead, it appears to capture the fraction of people in chronic pain. We show that in the late 1990s, physicians began prescribing opioids more aggressively to treat pain. Taken together, our estimates suggest that drug deaths rates would be 43% lower in 2015 had prescribing practices stayed at 1995 levels.
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Copy CitationWilliam N. Evans and Ethan M.J. Lieber, "Prescription for Disaster: The SSDI Rate, Pain, and Prescribing Practices," NBER Working Paper 34265 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34265.Download Citation
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Non-Technical Summaries
- Death rates due to drug poisonings began to surge in the US in the mid-1990s, marking the emergence of an epidemic that has persisted...
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