Opioid Treatment Matters: an Analysis of District Attorney Non-Prosecution

Drug use and drug overdose have become an overriding concern both for civic order and due to the raw death toll from the opioid epidemic. One reform push in the late 2010s/early 2020s, county-level District Attorneys signalling that they would not prose- cute drug use and related crimes, aimed to reduce overdose by reducing criminalization and stigma as a barrier to opioid treatment. At its peak, the policy covered between twenty and thirty million Americans. Using hand-collected data on District Attorney policies and Augmented Synthetic Control for causal identification, I estimate null ef- fects of non-prosecution policies on an urban area’s opioid overdose rates. I hypothesize my findings reflect that non-prosecution policies likely did not affect drug overdose once controlling for the increase in drug overdose in the late 2010s.