This Wednesday, former EconLog blogger James Schneider is coming to GMU to present a draft of his amazing new book, The Deadly Sins: An Exploration of Behavioral Health Economics. Schneider, a true polymath, interweaves research in economics, medicine, and psychology to teach us how to think and what to think about diet, exercise, addiction, mountain-climbing, and much more.
I’ve been reading drafts of this book for years, and I am a huge fan. This is the book that deserves to be the next Freakonomics. Publishers, you heard it here first!
READER COMMENTS
GregS
Oct 11 2016 at 1:27pm
Thank you for the update. I have been awaiting this book’s release since Schneider was an Econ blogger.
In his post “A Few Dangers of Heroin Prohibition,” which I believe discusses material from his book, he talks about several risk factors for heroin overdoses. In that post he sort of dismisses the notion that black market heroin contains fatal adulterants, and he says that this is an insignificant cause of overdose deaths. This may have seemed true two years ago when he wrote the post, but things have changed *a lot* in the past two years. I see almost weekly reports of a dozen people poisoned by a bad batch of heroin, which was spiked with fentanyl or something even more potent. This is a fairly recent trend and I think it’s what is driving the very recent spike in heroin overdose deaths. Hopefully his discussion of heroin accounts for the most recent few years, because the causal factors have (I think) changed dramatically. It’s not just the number of users that’s increasing; deaths per user (insofar as we can even know the numerator and denominator for that ratio) have increased fairly dramatically. So the habit is becoming not just more common but also more dangerous.
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