Opioids and transplantable organs

 Here's a paper that looks at how overdose deaths have joined automobile fatalities as a major source of deceased organ donations.

Opioids and Organs: How Overdoses Affect the Supply and Demand for Organ Transplants by Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, Bethany Lemont, and Keith Teltser, American Journal of Health Economics, 2024

"Abstract: As the incidence of fatal drug overdose quadrupled in the US over the past two decades, patients awaiting organ transplants may be unintended beneficiaries. We use Vital Statistics mortality data, merged with the universe of transplant candidates in the US from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, to study the extent to which the growth in opioid-related deaths affects the supply of deceased organ donors and transplants. Using two separate identification strategies, we find that opioid-related deaths led to more than 26,000 organ transplants in the US between 2000 and 2018. We find that transplant centers are increasingly recovering organs from overdose victims for transplant, with the association between opioid-related deaths and organ donors more than doubling between 2000 and 2018. We also present evidence that transplant candidates are more willing to use organs from those who died of opioid-related causes when organ shortages are relatively severe."

"The share of donors dying via overdose is now as large as the share killed in motor vehicle accidents, a sobering reflection of the opioid epidemic that produced a fourfold increase in annual overdose deaths between 1999 and 2019 (CDC 2020)."