operations research for drug policy and addiction

I enjoyed listening to Jon Caulkins’ Omega Rho lecture at the INFORMS Annual Meeting. The abstract for the talk is:

Operations Research in Service of Drug and Addictions Policy: Lessons from and for the Discipline of Operations Research
Jonathan P.Caulkins
H.Guyford Stever Professorship of Operations Research and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University

I am an OR missionary. I have carried our tools and perspectives into the fields of drug policy and addiction. When traveling far afield, one often encounters opportunities to do good by applying what seem to be quite basic precepts back home, and one returns with a deeper understanding of one’s own culture and its strengths and weaknesses. That has certainly been true of my professional tour. I will share success stories – instances in which by virtue of being the only person thinking about an issue from the perspective of a math modeler, I was able to make fundamental contributions by doing analyses that anyone with training in OR would view as quite elementary. I will also try to share some insights into our disciplinary culture. Drug policy, like most policy domains, is inherently interdisciplinary. So I work with scholars from many disciplines. That experience has given me an appreciation of different disciplines’ strengths and limitations when grappling with messy unstructured problems. I firmly believe that diversity is essential to good decision making, including disciplinary diversity. But I am also interested in which disciplines’ graduates are leaders, not just members, of the teams that shape high-level and strategic decision making. I will close with some thoughts about how we might increase our discipline’s “market share” within t! hose leadership roles.

This was an interesting talk about being an OR practitioner and solving real problems. Jon talked about the general principles he uses to influence policies. This involves doing good work, but more importantly, it involves asking good research questions. Jon asks excellent research questions. Jon summarized the impact his answers to these questions have had on policy. Jon’s work modeled drug lifetimes and life cycles using Markov chain models, a feature common to all drug types that could be used to forecast when drugs would go out of favor. He talked about modeling types of users–heavy and light–and the insights one can obtain when considering different classes of users. I enjoyed the discussion on pricing and drug purity, two issues that are often overlooked by decision makers and therefore have impact.

A really great part of the talk was when Jon took on Big Data. He said that in his experience, being the first with any data at all is really important for influencing policy. Many times, public safety leaders make decisions with zero data points or one data point (an anecdote!). Going from 0 to 100 data points can change a policy, going from 100 data points to “Big Data,” not so much.

David Hutton blogged about Jon’s talk on the INFORMS2014 blog [Link].

Earlier posts about Jon Caulkins’ talks:

• half-baked operations research
• destroying drug cartels with operations research