More Americans died from drug overdose in 2014 than any year on record and six in 10 of those involved opioids. How did we get here and what to do about it?
Media reports have suggested that many young athletes who become injured abuse prescription painkillers and may move to heroin. One of the first studies to look at this suggests otherwise.
The nation is still in the grip of an opioid addiction epidemic, but there is some good news. Treatment options are expanding, as professionals learn more about the illness.
The Senate passed a bill July 13 to address the opioid epidemic. Georgia recently passed a bill that would limit rather than expand the number of treatment centers. Could others follow suit?
What exactly is addiction? What role, if any, does choice play? And if addiction involves choice, how can we call it a "brain disease," with its implications of involuntariness?
We don't know enough about the people who use painkillers non-medically to make the judgement that there is a natural transition from legal to illicit drug use.
Hoping to avoid the pitfalls and tropes of drug genre photography, documentary photographer Aaron Goodman spent a year following three addicts enrolled in a heroin-assisted treatment program.
We are witnessing widespread abuse of legal, prescribed drugs that, while structurally similar to illicit opioids such as heroin, are used for sound medical practices. So how did we get here?
Why have the demographics of heroin use changed so much? For that, we can look to dramatic increase in prescriptions for opioid painkillers, such as Oxycontin or Vicodin.