The Prairie Doc: Opioids: The Unfolding of a Crisis

By now everyone with a television or internet connection has heard of the “Opioid Crisis in America”. Deaths from accidental overdoses of opioids each year have now surpassed deaths from automobile accidents. Depending on whose numbers you read, these deaths range from 50,000 to 70,000 each year, versus 38,800 from vehicle accidents in 2019. Just how did we get here?

I have been practicing long enough to have witnessed the progression of this problem. In medical school in the 1970s, we were taught to be cautious and limit the prescribing of morphine and Tylenol with codeine because they had th...