David M. Hall

UO Doctoral Candidate - Economics
Health Economist
Professional Home Cook
WI Sports Enthusiast

[David M. Hall @studhall]

@realjoshkoenig @robkhenderson Good question, two answers:
1. That’s what the synthetic control matched on. The states chosen are all late-breaking fentanyl states when we run structural break tests.
2. We do run a western US only comparison and it’s robust to that.

[David M. Hall @studhall]

@realjoshkoenig @robkhenderson Robust to many different synthetic controls but these are the main weights.
The results are pretty comparable (29 and 23.8% of OD 2021-2023 are attributed to regime change). And while both OR and WA decriminalized, they did so in very different ways.

[David M. Hall @studhall]

@realjoshkoenig @robkhenderson We use a synthetic control, so the comparison is much broader than another bordering west state.
In terms of effect size difference, it’s a similar estimate. 30-40% of deaths from 2021-2023 are due to the regime change. The outcome is a per capita which ensures comparability.

[David M. Hall @studhall]

@robkhenderson Thank you for reading, Rob!

[David M. Hall @studhall]

@realjoshkoenig @robkhenderson Yes, nationally it was the case that overdoses peak in 2023. But I disagree it is impossible to disentangle other effects: in fact, a national shock would be the easiest to “remove” using fixed effects. Any other macro effects you’re thinking of? Feedback is genuinely welcome!

[David M. Hall @studhall]

Whether the results fit your priors or not, I hope we've given you a transparent look into how hard a question like this is to assess. We continued to try to challenge these results with robustness checks, but they continued to hold up.

[David M. Hall @studhall]

4/ The idea with the SCM is to build counterfactuals for OR and WA using a weighted combination of other states. Appendix Figure 3 shows the main donor weights.

The result is not unique to SCM; our results are robust to TWFE and a slew of alternative estimators.

[David M. Hall @studhall]

A few final notes:
1. We study the net effect of broad decriminalization regimes in Oregon and Washington, not any single mechanism.
2. The appendix reconciles prior studies.
3. A full GitHub replication package will be available soon.

[David M. Hall @studhall]

3/ The empirical challenge here is to isolate the impact of each policy without allowing contamination from COVID or fentanyl's geographic spread (more on that in a moment).

To do so, we utilize a synthetic control opting to match on outcome only for the sake of transparency.

[David M. Hall @studhall]

1/ Did drug decriminalization in increase overdose mortality?

https://t.co/3lKxpHZrEM

Our (@benconomics and @q_econ) NBER working paper studies two 2021 policy changes: Oregon's Measure 110 and Washington's Blake Decision.

Thanks to @Arnold_Ventures for your support!

[David M. Hall @studhall]

2/ We first show/confirm that these policies did indeed reduce arrests. We find that WA was decriminalized in practice until the passage of SB 5536.

We then look to what happened next with regard to overdose mortality.

[David M. Hall @studhall]

@CharlesFLehman Thanks for reading, Charles!