No. 243: Words on Drugs

Recreational drug use kills tens of thousands of people per year, and much of that toll stems from a single fact: users rarely know what they are actually consuming. Information asymmetry about product quality is acute because drugs are experience goods, and the institutions that normally certify quality, such as regulators, courts, and market mechanisms, are largely absent. We ask whether providing verifiable product information is useful to consumers in this setting: whether they engage with information about product quality and whether it ultimately shapes consumption choices and health outcomes. In a natural field experiment with KnowDrugs, a harm-reduction application with nearly 80,000 users, we randomize the provision of highly verifiable information-hard drug-checking statistics-versus information with low verifiability-narrative consumer experiences. We show that verifiable, process-generated disclosures outperform consumer feedback, raising engagement with safety information, harm-reduction practices, and well-being. Further, saliently identifying the source of the information amplifies reliance on verifiable information, suggesting that the information generating process is important to users. Our results highlight the important role of verifiability in informal markets defined by uncertainty and the absence of institutional trust.