The Huffington Post:
A quarter of patients given a short-term prescription for painkillers transitioned to long-term use.
We know how opioid addictions end: all too often, in death by overdose. About 16,000 Americans every year die of an overdose of opioid painkillers, such as oxycodone or fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We know less about how opioid addictions start. It’s much harder to find and study people who start taking too many pills than it is to count dead bodies. But it’s becoming clear that the opioid addictions, which have ruined millions of lives over the past decade, rarely begin the way you might imagine a life-ruining addiction begins — on some gang-ridden street corner.
Many start with an innocuous visit to the doctor’s office.
Read the whole article here.
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