People Rarely Die After Using Opioids Prescribed for Them

Although prescription pain medication is commonly blamed for the "opioid epidemic," such drugs play a small and shrinking role in deaths involving this category of psychoactive substances. A recent study of opioid-related deaths in Massachusetts underlines this crucial point, finding that prescription analgesics were detected without heroin or fentanyl in less than 17 percent of the cases. Furthermore, decedents had prescriptions for the opioids that showed up in toxicology tests just 1.3 percent of the time.