Indopedia All Things Marijuana
According to a new study that will be released this week, the steady decrease in employed adult Americans over the past two decades is strongly connected to the increase in opioid prescription rates over that same time frame. Princeton economist Alan Krueger discovered this connection by comparing county-level opioid prescription rates from 1999-2001 and 2014-2016 to labor force data from the same years. “The problem of the depressed labor force has run into the problem of the opioid crisis,” he concluded, “Now they’re connected.”
Currently, around 12% of “prime age” men, aged between 25 and 54, do not have jobs and aren’t looking for jobs. This statistic is up from 8% in the late 1990’s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only 69% of prime age men are currently employed, down from 75% in 2000. The rate of prime age women who are employed has also decreased, but less dramatically, from 60% in 2000 to 57.2% today.
During this same time period, sales of prescription opioids have quadrupled, and the number of opioid overdoses has increased significantly. Krueger found that unemployed people reported higher usage of painkillers than those who were…
