Improving Policy Evaluations Of The Opioid Crisis

With fatal opioid overdoses rising steadily between 1999 and 2022, researchers have tried to identify effective policy approaches that can stem the tide and mitigate associated harms. However, policy evaluations intended to inform policy choices may muddy the waters, particularly when they generate inconsistent findings.

In this article, we discuss a unifying framework and language for presenting analyses using quasi-experimental methods evaluating opioid policies to facilitate greater understanding of similarities and differences across studies. We discuss key data, methods, and design issues that confront researchers in this space, with the goal of increasing the pace of good science.