What's the dollar value of pain? Or more accurately: What's the value of getting rid of it or avoiding it completely?
That's the question posed by a team of Icelandic and American economists in a working paper published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It's not just an academic inquiry — the opiate epidemic currently ravaging many U.S. communities owes much of its existence to the more aggressive stance toward pain that pharmaceutical companies, doctors and patients started adopting in the 1990s.
