Doctors and other health care providers still prescribe highly addictive pain medications at rates widely considered unsafe. Critics say the practice exposes tens of millions of patients each year to unnecessary risk of addiction, overdose and death.
Despite widespread devastation caused by America’s opioid epidemic, an investigation by NPR found that doctors and other health care providers still prescribe highly addictive pain medications at rates widely considered unsafe.
Public data, including new government studies and reports in medical literature, shows enough prescriptions are being written each year for half of all Americans to have one.
Patients still receive more than twice the volume of opioids considered normal before the prescribing boom began in the late 1990s.
“We’re 5% of the world’s population, but we consume 80% of the world’s prescription opioids,” said Dr. Jonathan Chen, a physician and researcher at Stanford University Medical Center who studies prescribing patterns.
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