In the midst of a national epidemic, doctors and health regulators are trying to find the right balance between helping people in pain and keeping them from overdosing on prescription painkillers.
Prescriptions for opioid pain relievers jumped from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 200 million in 2014. It is unclear how many Americans take the drugs since the total includes refills and multiple drugs for the same patient. Overdose deaths from painkillers more than quadrupled during the same period, to about 19,000 in 2014, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
An estimated 2 million Americans abuse prescription painkillers. More than 40 die every day from accidental overdoses, a rate that a top federal health official calls “doctor driven.”
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