The United States needs to curb excessive opioid prescribing and improve access to pain management techniques, suggests a new government study.
Researchers found that more than one third of US adults were prescribed the medications in 2015 and many also misused the drugs.
“A very large proportion and large number of adults use these medications in a given year,” said study author Dr Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland. “I was still a bit surprised that 38 percent or about 92 million people used prescription opioids in 2015.”
