An ‘Overprescription of Opioids’ That Led to a Crisis
The director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse pointed to economic factors as a cause of the epidemic.
In 2016, 64,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S., most of them due to opioids. That’s more than the number of Americans killed in the wars in Vietnam and Iraq combined.
Three factors led to those numbers, Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a partat the Spotlight Health Festival, which is co-hosted by The Aspen Institute and First,the epidemic was started by a healthcare system that sought to minimize pain and suffering. Physicians were taught that those with pain wouldn’t get addicted to pain medication, she said. “Unfortunately, those beliefs were completely wrong,” she said. What it resulted in was “Volkow
