The Underestimated Cost Of The Opioid Crisis

On November 20, 2017, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) of the Executive Office of the President of the United States released this report on the underestimated cost of the opioid crisis. In the report, the CEA finds that previous estimates of the economic cost of the opioid crisis greatly understate it by undervaluing the most important component of the loss—fatalities resulting from overdoses. This paper estimates the economic cost of these deaths using conventional economic estimates for valuing life routinely used by U.S. Federal agencies . . .