How to Ease the Pain? Opioids and A Modern Public Health Crisis

Ryan Argetsinger, 2/18/25

Since 1999, almost 47,600 deaths have been attributed to opioid misuse and overdoses. Peaking at around 114,000 in 2023, the crisis continues to take a toll on a significant number of lives, still tolling above 80,000 deaths by overdose in 2024. Although the crisis is multifaceted, the driving factors should be addressed and can allow readers to further understand how public health officials can implement routes to change pharmaceutical regulations. 

Opioids, also referred to as narcotics or painkillers, are medications that allow for patients to gain some relief of severe or chronic pain. Most medications are oral tablets or pills that can be ingested, acting quickly to inhibit afferent signaling from nociceptors to the brain through the spinal cord. Although these drugs have not only been beneficial for patients with chronic pain and allow for brief relief for patients with everyday maladies and symptoms, the possibility for misuse may stem from diminished tolerance, which then builds up into an addiction. 

Opioids can create a dependency in patients that results in the formation of physical and psychological addiction, which is one of the reasons for the high cost of the epidemic. The highly addictive nature of opioids are why physicians must treat the prescription and management of opioids among patients very carefully and with discretion. For example, with growing rates of chronic disease, patients that are admitted for opioid addiction are more likely to have more than 1 chronic health issue. This correlation between the growth of chronic disease and opioid related addictions go hand in hand with a statistical increase in overdoses, which is why painkiller administration needs to be under careful observation among patients with chronic diseases. 

Outside of the addictive nature of opioids, overprescription is still a major concern among public health officials. Initially, statistics had shown that physicians were overprescribing patients since the 1990s, but peaked at around 16 billion units prescribed in 2013. Since then, policymakers and physicians have made an effort to curb the consumption and prescription of opioid analgesic drugs, which has resulted in a decrease in prescribed units, but the number of overdose-related deaths has stayed consistently above 80,000. This may be slightly explained by synthetic opioids, many of which are laced with fentanyl, made by clandestine laboratories. 

Lastly, prevention has been another major cause that has not slowed the number of admitted addictions and overdoses. The lack of public awareness and patient education all played into factors that influenced addiction rates, along with the aforementioned factor of highly addictive medication misuse. The lack of research on the overuse of opioids, compacted with their overprescription, continued to worsen the proceeding epidemic. Even today, there are still matters of primary prevention, education, research, and awareness of synthetic painkillers that continue to exaggerate the number of cases. Furthermore, the lack of regulation for opioids and their tracking by patient observation and number of prescriptions given further contributes to the total number of deaths and addictions of the opioid epidemic. 

Considering the statistics and research that has been done in the past twenty years on opioid utilization, effects on the body, and rates of prescription, there has been significant improvement in physician and scientific understanding for how to enhance manageable prescriptions of opioids, as needed. Public health officials now understand the significance of getting the epidemic under control and have initiated educational campaigns and the administration of Narcan, a drug that inhibits overdose effects before becoming lethal. However, the number of overdoses and deaths continues to stay high, which calls into question how to better control the substance and tackle issues of synthetic opioids. Physicians and public health officials should implement greater measures to control opioid prescription rates to avoid habitual and recreational use while also educating patients on the dangers that can come with their prescription. More said, there should be greater measures and regulations on pharmaceutical companies to research alternative methods of opioid production that lead to less addictive substances (if possible). The cost of the opioid epidemic continues to rise, but there are measures that can be taken to address the issue and attempt to slow, and eventually control the abuse of opioids and other narcotics. 

References:

What Are Opiods

How increasing medical access to opioids contributes to the opioid epidemic: Evidence from Medicare Part D

Opioid crisis: addiction, overprescription, and insufficient primary prevention

Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts