“The War On Drugs 2.0: Darknet Fentanyl’s Rise And The Effects Of Regulatory And Law Enforcement Action”, 2019-10-08 (; similar):
U.S. overdose deaths attributed to synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, have increased from under 3,000 in 2013 to nearly 20,000 in 2016, making up half of all opioid-related overdose deaths.
Using web scrapes of darknet markets 2014–22016, I provide historical prices for fentanyl and its most popular analogs and find that fentanyl vendors priced fentanyl in 2014 at a 90% discount compared to an equivalent dose of heroin.
Using regression discontinuity, I evaluate the effects of two major law enforcement and regulatory events. I find minimal lasting effects of US legal actions intended to disrupt darknet markets, but there are statistically-significant indications of a price increase corresponding with regulatory action in China.
Despite these indications of some regulatory success, fentanyl prices remained ~90% cheaper than heroin.