The premise is straightforward: If you call 911 when someone near you is overdosing, the state will grant you legal immunity for certain crimes — often including possession of illegal drugs or paraphernalia, or even parole violations. The logic is clinically sensible. Most overdoses happen in group settings, and opioid overdoses typically develop slowly — often more than an hour after drug use. There is usually plenty of time for medical intervention if someone calls for help.
But what GSL proponents did not fully anticipate is what else these laws change, and our new research suggests the unintended consequences may be beneficial.
Here is the complication: Most opioid overdoses involve drugs bought on the black market. When someone calls 911 under a GSL, that call also typically brings police to the scene. And police presence at an overdose — regardless of what immunity the bystander enjoys — creates real perceived risk for anyone involved in illegal drug sales. Even when a GSL’s protections cover sellers, they cannot always be certain where the legal lines are drawn.
Using state-level arrest data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program spanning two decades, we asked if Good Samaritan laws affect arrests for illicit drug sales. The findings are striking.
States that adopted GSLs experienced significantly fewer arrests for illicit drug sales across multiple drug categories. The biggest decrease was for arrests for selling synthetic narcotics, the category that includes the fentanyl driving so many overdose deaths. Arrests for illegal sales of marijuana, opium and cocaine derivatives also dramatically decreased.
Word travels in these communities, and people react accordingly, so the kinds of legal immunity provided under a state’s Good Samaritan law can be important.
Indeed, we find that laws that provide legal protection against heroin possession, violating parole and preventing civil asset forfeiture further reduce arrests for illegal synthetic narcotic sales. Our results also held up when we accounted for other common opioid policies, such as prescription drug monitoring programs or access to anti-overdose medications, already in place in most states.
To be clear, reducing drug sale arrests is not the same as eliminating drug markets. And GSLs have not delivered the large, consistent reductions in overdose deaths their designers hoped for. The opioid crisis is as complex as it is devastating, and no single policy is likely to solve it alone.
But our research suggests that GSLs are doing something meaningful that has gone largely unnoticed: They are quietly disrupting the illicit drug markets that supply opioids in the first place. By increasing the likelihood that police show up at overdose scenes and by creating genuine legal uncertainty for drug sellers, GSLs appear to push at least some illicit activity out of the market.
For policymakers revisiting their states’ GSL statutes, this has practical implications. Broader immunity provisions, especially those covering more people and more drug-related activities, appear to generate greater deterrent effects on illicit sales by increasing the likelihood of police presence at the scene of an overdose. That is worth knowing at a time when so many opioid policies have proven disappointingly ineffective.
GSLs were designed to save lives by encouraging 911 calls. That they may also be shrinking drug markets is not a reason to treat them as a silver bullet, but it is a reason to take them more seriously.
Raymond J. March is the assistant director of the Free Market Institute and the Christopher L. Culp Professor of Economics at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. He is a non-resident fellow with the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University. Veeshan Rayamajhee is an assistant professor of economics at New Mexico State University. Elisha K. Denkyirah is a postdoctoral fellow with the Knee Regulatory Research Center and the Center for Free Enterprise at West Virginia University.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
