David Neumark, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Bogdan Savych write, “In this Letter, we find that prolonged prescribing of opioids leads to longer duration of temporary disability benefits among workers with work-related low-back injuries. Our estimates indicate that longer-term opioid prescriptions roughly triple the duration of temporary disability benefits, compared to similar workers with similar injuries who do not get longer-term opioid prescriptions.”

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