Featured Researcher: Rosalie Liccardo Pacula
Rosalie Liccardo Pacula studies the economics of addiction, the market for addictive goods, and policies targeting addictive substances, including access to and funding for effective treatments. The topics are fascinating, she says, because “the markets for mental health care services and addictive goods are quagmires due to imperfect information, barriers to entry and exit, significant externalities, and poor quality data. This makes studying them particularly fun and challenging.”
Pacula is the Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Health Policy, Economics, and Law at the University of Southern California (USC). She is also a senior fellow at USC’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. Prior to joining the USC faculty, she worked for more than two decades as a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, where she was a long-time codirector of the nonprofit’s Drug Policy Research Center and participated in studies for the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Commission, and the UK Home Office. She currently codirects a RAND-USC opioid policy center.
Pacula’s recent research explores the spillover effects of OxyContin reformulation on other drug mortality and disease, the effectiveness of alternative state approaches to the distribution of the opioid overdose reversal medication naloxone, and the health benefits of higher-dose prescribing of buprenorphine. She was a contributor to the RAND monograph America’s Opioid Ecosystem: How Leveraging System Interactions Can Help Curb Addiction, Overdose, and Other Harms. She currently cochairs the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders and participated in the NASEM report Public Health Consequences of Changes in the Cannabis Policy Landscape. She is also the immediate past president of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy.
Pacula lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Joseph, a senior vice president at Hewlett-Packard. Their daughter is studying law at Santa Clara University and their son, a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is applying to PhD programs in economics. Pacula received her bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Santa Clara University and her master’s and PhD in economics from Duke University.
