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Recent research has recognized that states have enacted highly heterogeneous PDMP laws, with some mandating their use and others not doing so, some requiring daily updates and others permitting significant lags, and some requiring that law enforcement have a warrant to access data and others not having this requirement in place 2 This editorial identifies additional select guideposts for future analyses of PDMPs drawing on principles of public health law research developed by Wagenaar and Burris 3 OUTCOME MEASURES With rare exception, studies of PDMPs and overdoses have conceptualized and operationalized their outcomes as some permutation of overdose mortality, probably because vital statistics data enumerating overdose deaths are widely available (although perhaps overdoses are misclassified) Melding implementation science theories and methods to analyze the interface of PDMPs and prescriber and pharmacist practices is a vital next step, although it will require advancing implementation science so that it more rigorously and comprehensively conceptualizes and measures the external environment and the processes through which it shapes implementation outcomes 4 RISK ENVIRONMENTS The risk environment model posits that laws are part of the broader macro-level political environment and that they may shape the health of people who use drugs by interacting with features of the social, economic, physical, and health care- criminal justice intervention environments that operate at the macro, meso, and micro levels, as well as with other features of the political environment 5,6 PDMP impacts on overdoses may thus depend on these other risk environment features When overdose mortality is the outcome, investigators should consider whether case fatality rates vary systematically by the victim's social position (e g , gender, race/ethnicity), perhaps traveling with systematic population-level differences in comorbidities, naloxone access, and willingness to summon EMS personnel and, by extension, the police