Ordinary Banana

It's not actually a huge result. Men participating in the labor force decreased by 3% over 15 years (I believe this is after age adjustment), and they are saying 44% of that (= 1.3%) is due to opioids. 1/

They are also not the first people to observe the association. Alan Krueger, for example, has also published that a huge number (about 40%) of prime aged men outside the labor force regularly consume opioids. https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/economic/conf/great-recovery-2016/Alan-B-Krueger.pdf … 2/

The novelty in this paper is that this result persists after accounting for proxy measures of what labor force participation rates *would otherwise be* without opioids. 3/

since it introduces variation in opioid usage uncorrelated to economic factors. tl;dr; the novelty from this paper is that you can't easily wave away the result as "it's the economy driving opioid usage", which was a possible objection to Kreuger.

In summary, this paper provides compelling evidence that opioid usage or some strong non-economic correlate is reducing labor force participation. Example of a non-economic correlate, disability caused by the increasing number of, um, service sector jobs vs industrial ones? 6/6