This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

We've been dealing with an epidemic in the United States related to opioids.

Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National

Institutes of Health.

He spoke February 12th at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

What we've seen is that the increased number of prescriptions are driving the non-medical use

of prescription drugs.

Drugs that are prescribed to treat pain.

So there's tremendous availability of prescriptions.

There's some 260 million prescriptions written in each year for opioids.

That's not tablets, that's prescriptions.

So it's millions and millions of these.

And some of them are available for diversion

and use inappropriately.

Some of the pain patients may become hooked or their meds may find their way to friends or relatives who take them recreationally

or a prescription opioid user may transition to heroin.

Heroin is just another opioid drug, so the brain doesn't distinguish.

Whether it comes from a pharmacy or from a street drug dealer, what's been drawing the most public

health attention is the overdose death rates related to prescription opioids and heroin,

which have increased markedly over the last 15 years.

Right now we see drug overdoses killing nearly 50,000 persons in a given year in the United States.

What are we doing about this?

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