If New York had Massachusetts’s opioid-overdose rate from 2000 to 2019, the economist Abby Alpert estimates that an additional 27,000 New Yorkers would have died of overdoses. 27,000. Massachusetts is not poorer than New York. It doesn’t have a higher unemployment rate. It doesn’t have a bigger problem with gangs or organized crime or drug trafficking. The two states are like peas in a pod. The only relevant difference is that half a century ago New York forced doctors to make two additional carbon copies of every prescription they wrote—and Massachusetts did not. And those carbon copies saved
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