By all accounts, we are living in a humanitarian and public health crisis. Deaths from prescription opioid overdose have quadrupled in the last 15 years, and data show that as of June 2017, the number of opioid deaths has surpassed the peak of the HIV/Aids crisis in 1995.



Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Profit-seeking by pharmaceutical companies is ultimately behind the rise of opioid prescriptions – and all the broken lives that result from this epidemic.

In a new paper, labor economist Alan Krueger finds that participation in the labor force has dropped in areas where more opioids are prescribed, and that large swaths of the prime age working population take prescription pain medication on a regular basis.



Krueger’s findings are in line with the “deaths of despair” sweeping across the country, and while the opioid epidemic is without doubt a humanitarian disaster, it also poses a political problem for President Trump, who campaigned on bringing jobs back to the very communities most facing this health crisis.

The complexity of a medical crisis like the opioid epidemic is not one that can be distilled down to a singular cause, like malfeasance by pharmaceutical companies. However, if the president is serious about getting people back to work - the flagship economic message of his campaign – the relationship between the prevalence of opioids and labor force participation is one of the few levers he can pull.

In a lawsuit filed earlier this summer, Ohio’s Attorney General accused a number of well known drug companies of spending “millions of dollars on promotional activities and materials that falsely deny or trivialize the risks of opioids while overstating the benefits of using them for chronic pain.”

Pharmaceutical companies are understating the risk of addiction, overstating the effectiveness of addiction screening tools, and asserting that opioid dependence is easily managed. This behavior is not new. In 2007, three executives Purdue Pharma, the firm that manufactures OxyContin (a highly addictive narcotic), pled guilty to criminal charges that they misled regulators and doctors over how addictive OxyContin was.

So why are pharmaceutical companies once again engaging in shady tactics to increase opioid prescriptions? The short answer is that they stand to earn a lot of money. OxyContin made its manufacturers tens of billions of dollars - making the $600 million dollars in fines paid by Purdue Pharma’s parent company and the $34.5 million paid by the three executives in 2007 a drop in the bucket.

The founder and chairman of Insys Theraputics, which makes Fentanyl – one of the most dangerous narcotics on the market – is worth $2.1bn, and shares of Insys make up about 30% of his net worth. In 2016 alone, an estimated 20,100 Americans died from overdosing on Fentanyl.



The limitless profit-seeking by segments of the pharmaceutical industry is an extreme case of how such business incentives can cause real harm. However, these practices – putting short-term profits over all else – pervade our economy, from industries ranging from internet providers to financial institutions.

The power that these pharmaceutical companies hold in the market is precisely what allows them exploit the weak regulation that they helped to create – regulations that that would have put public health before economic gain.



At the end of the day, unchecked corporate power is to blame for the devastation our communities are facing, not doctors or people living with addiction. This imbalance of power is clearly affecting public health, and new research suggests the epidemic is hurting the labor market as well.



Addressing the opioid epidemic is first and foremost a moral imperative – saving lives is more important than creating jobs. But addressing this public health crisis could improve labor market outcomes as well.

This requires the president to have a much better handle on what the actual drivers of the opioid epidemic are – unchecked corporate power that so far his administration has shown absolutely no inclination to address.