| By Keith Humphreys President Obama has committed to sign the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which includes among its provisions new policies to reduce inappropriate prescribing of prescription opioids such as Oxycontin and Vicodin. Given the ongoing epidemic of addiction and death caused by opioid painkillers, this seems like sensible public-health policy, but some critics … | | |  | | | | The latest economic and domestic policy from Wonkblog | | | | |  Drugs are prepared to shoot intravenously by a user addicted to heroin on February 6, 2014 in St. Johnsbury Vermont. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) By Keith Humphreys President Obama has committed to sign the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which includes among its provisions new policies to reduce inappropriate prescribing of prescription opioids such as Oxycontin and Vicodin. Given the ongoing epidemic of addiction and death caused by opioid painkillers, this seems like sensible public-health policy, but some critics charge that tighter prescribing rules simply cause prescription opioid users to switch to heroin, thereby feeding a second opioid epidemic. The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine recently published the first systematic analysis of this terrifying possibility. Wilson Compton of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who led the analysis, discovered that the timing of the prescription opioid and heroin epidemics is not consistent with the simple narrative that increased controls on the former instigated use of the latter. Heroin use and heroin-related emergency-room visits and hospitalizations were rising for years before the 2009-2011 period in which controls of prescription opioids expanded — for example, by strengthening of state prescription-monitoring programs, crackdowns on pill mills and the introduction of an abuse-deterrent formulation of Oxycontin. Compton and colleagues also noted that fatal heroin overdoses began rising in 2007 — prior to the initiation of tighter opioid prescribing practices — and have not showed any consistent relationship with prescription opioid overdoses since. Heroin deaths rose from 2011 to 2012, when prescription opioid deaths had their only year-on-year drop, but they kept rising the next year, when prescription deaths were flat and have kept increasing since the time that prescription opioid deaths began rising again. | | | If controls on prescription opioids are not driving the heroin epidemic, what caused this drug to reemerge? Read the rest on Wonkblog.
Chart of the day Men are spending more time in the kitchen. Rachel Premack has more. 
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