Abstract
This paper estimates the effect of the OxyContin reformulation and the subsequent heroin crisis on grandparent caregiving in the United States—grandparents who are primarily responsible for their grandchildren. The empirical approach is a difference-in-differences and a series of event studies that exploit variation in the timing of the reformulation of OxyContin and geographic variation in pre-reformulation rates of nonmedical use of OxyContin across states. I find that a standard deviation increase in pre-reformulation nonmedical use of OxyContin leads to higher grandparent caregiving. Increases range from 2.5 to 8.5%, on average, relative to the baseline mean. This change is more pronounced among grandparents between 46 and 65 years of age. When I examine changes in heroin-related mortality as a possible mechanism, I find modest increases in grandparent caregiving when no parents are present or when no or only one parent is present of 1.80 and 1.50% of the baseline mean, on average.
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Data availability
All data used in this project is publicly available. Access to detailed mortality files can be obtained from the National Center for Health Statistics. The replication package for all analyses is available from the author.
Notes
For more information on OxyContin see: Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (2008). OxyContin®: Prescription Drug Abuse—2008 Revision. Substance Abuse Treatment Advisory, Volume 7, Issue 1. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
I thank David Powell who facilitated these data. It is also available on Alpert et al. (2018) replication package.
The correlation between heroin-related death rates and deaths due to prescription opioids is 0.34. The correlation between heroin-related deaths and illicit fatal overdoses due to synthetic opioids is 0.68.
All results in tabular form are in Appendix Tables A10, A11, and A12.
On average, the age of grandparents who are responsible for grandchildren in my sample is 56.3.
Note that, the number of grandparents in the 30 to 45 age and 66 years old or more categories is small (7,086 and 4,945 on average respectively). In the other two groups the average is above 17,000.
Results available from the author.
Results available from the author.
Results available from the author.
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Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Illinois Chicago through its awards for creative activity. I thank Damien Dong and Alexis Davila for their excellent research assistance at various stages of this project. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback.
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Laurito, A. Spillovers of the Heroin Epidemic on Grandparent Caregiving. Popul Res Policy Rev 43, 25 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-024-09870-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-024-09870-x