Over the past several years, the sports media have presented several stories of youth athletes who have become addicted to prescription painkillers and eventually turned to heroin. If fact, one of these reports in Sports Illustrated was ominously titled “How painkillers are turning young athletes into heroin addicts."
While these trends suggest some dangerous overlap between prescription painkiller and heroin use, very little research has been done to see if this is an emerging pattern among youth athletes in the United States. In particular, young athletes who play one sport are at greater risk for injuries that may require some form of opioid pain management.
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