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The opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic, explainedIn 2014, more Americans died of drug overdoses than any other year on record: more than 47,000 deaths in just one year, according to new federal data . That's far more than the nearly 34,000 who died in car crashes, the almost 34,000 who died due to gun violence, and the nearly 42,000 who died due to HIV/AIDS during that epidemic's peak in 1995.But this latest drug epidemic is not driven primarily by illicit drugs. It began with a legal drug: opioid painkillers.Back in the 1990s, doctors agreed — and many still do — that America has a serious pain problem: Tens of millions of Americans experienced debilitating pain, and it was left untreated. So they looked for a solution — and, fueled by a misleading marketing push from pharmaceutical companies, landed on opioid-based painkillers, widely known by brand names such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin. The drugs proliferated.But this led to unintended, devastating results. Prescription painkiller abuse went up, and overdose deaths linked to the drugs did as well. Then, as policymakers and doctors took notice of widespread painkiller abuse, they pulled back access to the drugs. But federal data shows many of these drug users didn't just quit the drugs altogether — some instead moved to a lower-cost, more potent opioid, heroin, and some are reportedly moving to the even stronger opioid, fentanyl.As a result, nearly 29,000 deadly drug overdoses in 2014 — more than half of all overdose deaths that year — involved some type of opioid.Read More At: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-opioid-painkiller-and-heroin-epidemic-explained/ar-AAf0tJY
