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Opioid Overdose Crisis


In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to opioid pain relievers and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates.
Increased prescription of opioid medications led to widespread misuse of both prescription and non-prescription opioids before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive.

In 2015, more than 33,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose, including prescription opioids, heroin, and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.1 That same year, an estimated 2 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers, and 591,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder (not mutually exclusive).

Some facts about Opioid Overdose Crisis

  1. Roughly 21 to 29 percent of patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them.
  2. Between 8 and 12 percent develop an opioid use disorder.
  3. An estimated 4 to 6 percent who misuse prescription opioids transition to heroin.
  4. About 80 percent of people who use heroin first misused prescription opioids.
  5. Opioid overdoses increased 30 percent from July 2016 through September 2017 in 52 areas in 45 states.
  6. The Midwestern region saw opioid overdoses increase 70 percent from July 2016 through September 2017.
  7. Opioid overdoses in large cities increase by 54 percent in 16 states.

How Govt. is helping to combat the situation?

In response to the opioid crisis, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is focusing its efforts on five major priorities:

  • improving access to treatment and recovery services
  • promoting use of overdose-reversing drugs
  • strengthening our understanding of the epidemic through better public health surveillance
  • providing support for cutting-edge research on pain and addiction
  • advancing better practices for pain management

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a component of HHS, is the nation's leading medical research agency helping solve the opioid crisis via discovering new and better ways to prevent opioid misuse, treat opioid use disorders, and manage pain. In the summer of 2017, NIH met with pharmaceutical companies and academic research centers to discuss:

  1. safe, effective, non-addictive strategies to manage chronic pain
  2. new, innovative medications and technologies to treat opioid use disorders
  3. improved overdose prevention and reversal interventions to save lives and support recovery
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