"These regressions are difficult to interpret for a number of reasons, but if cross-county differences in opioid prescription rates can be taken as an exogenous result of differences in medical practices and norms conditional on personal characteristics and broad region dummies, the effect of the growth in opioid prescriptions on labor force can be estimated. In particular, I assume that the based opioid prescription rate coefficient reflects inherent differences across regions, and the interaction between prescriptions and time captures the effect of changes in prescriptions on labor force participation over time. This is a big leap, and ideally I would have preferred to have a baseline measure of prescriptions (country-level MME data are unavailable before 2010), so this calculation is at best considered illustrative. These caveats aside, opioid prescriptions per capita increased by a factor of 3.5 nationwide between 1999 and 2015, which is the equivalent of 0.55 log units. Multiplying 0.55 by the coefficient on the interaction between opioids and the second period (.011), suggests that the increase in opioid prescriptions could account for perhaps a 0.6 percentage point decline in male labor force participation, which is 20 percent of the observed decline in this period."