People Got COVID Checks. The Wall Street Journal Blames Them for Dying.
by Laurie Ruettimann
Allysia Finley has a theory: COVID stimulus checks caused overdose deaths. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, she argues that pandemic relief payments, not healthcare system failures or social collapse, drove the spike in drug deaths during COVID.
The Argument, Briefly
Finley cites a study from the International Journal of Drug Policy showing overdose deaths increased after each stimulus round, with strong correlations between payment amounts and deaths across states. She extends this to explain the recent 36% decline in overdoses, crediting the end of pandemic benefits rather than expanded treatment access or harm reduction efforts.
The study may be methodologically sound. The conclusion she draws from it is not.
Why This Argument Fails
Remember 2020? Emergency rooms were overwhelmed or avoided entirely by people terrified of COVID exposure. Addiction treatment facilities closed or shifted to telehealth, which does not work without stable housing, reliable internet, or a private space. Methadone clinics cut hours. Naloxone distribution programs shut down.
The people most likely to overdose lost access to every intervention that keeps them alive. They were isolated from family, cut off from support systems, locked out of treatment, and under extraordinary stress.
The stimulus payments arrived just as the healthcare system collapsed. Finley blames the checks.
If cash caused overdose deaths, you would see the same pattern after tax refunds, annual bonuses, and Alaska Permanent Fund dividends. You do not.
She also skips the counterfactual. Without stimulus payments: mass evictions, deeper food insecurity, economic desperation. Those conditions correlate with substance abuse and deaths of despair too. She does not weigh harms prevented because doing so would weaken her argument.
Who This Argument Serves
People who already believe poor people cannot be trusted with money. People who want intellectual cover for that belief. People who will forward this piece with “interesting data here” when what they mean is “see, I told you.”
Finley is not persuading skeptics. She is providing ammunition for arguments about food stamps, Medicaid work requirements, and child tax credits.
This is a moral argument disguised as public health research.
What Actually Happens When You Trust People
The Stanford Basic Income Lab and the Center for Guaranteed Income Research track guaranteed income pilots across the United States. The pattern is consistent: when people receive cash before crisis hits, without conditions or judgment, they do not self-destruct. They stabilize. They plan. They breathe.
Bootstraps, a docuseries currently in post-production, follows 11 American households for two and a half years as they participate in a guaranteed income experiment. The series is anticipated for release on a major streaming network in 2026. I volunteer with ITSA Foundation, which supports the project.
The Real Takeaway
Finley’s piece will surface in policy debates. Someone will cite it when arguing against the child tax credit or Medicaid expansion.
When they do, remember what she left out: the closed clinics, the overwhelmed ERs, the naloxone that never arrived, the treatment programs that went dark. The cash did not arrive in a vacuum. It arrived in a disaster.
Blaming the money is easier than blaming the system. It always has been.
That is not analysis. That is comfort for people who already decided that poor people cannot be helped.