The Internet and Prescription Drug Abuse

Abuse of prescription drugs has grown markedly over the last decade or so. Some have argued that this is due to the growth in online pharmacies, particularly ones that do not require physician visits prior to dispensing medications or, more ominously, ones that do not require any physician approval or prescription or even questionnaires to assess medical histories.

A recent paper by Anupam Jena and Dana Goldman argues that this connection might be quite real. The authors find that a 10% increase in the use of high speed internet - which increases access to online pharmacies - at the state level is associated with a 1% increase in admissions to treatment facilities for prescription drug use. Importantly, this finding is robust to a variety of falsification checks. In particular, the authors show that admissions for abuse of other drugs, such as cocaine and alcohol, whose purchase is unlikely to be linked to access to internet, did not rise with the proliferation of internet during the same time period.