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November 1, 2017

The Underestimated Cost of the Opioid Crisis

The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) estimates the economic cost of fatalities resulting from overdoses using conventional economic estimates for valuing life routinely used by U.S. Federal agencies. It also adjusts for underreporting of opioids in overdose deaths, includes heroin-related fatalities, and incorporates nonfatal costs of opioid misuse. CEA estimates that in 2015, the economic cost of the opioid crisis was $504.0 billion, or 2.8 percent of GDP that year. This is over six times larger than the most recently estimated economic cost of the epidemic.

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