The ultimate goal of pain medicine—a powerful painkiller with few to no side effects, such as dependence or overdose—is still elusive. But a team of researchers from the Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina believe they’ve come closer to reaching it. Their latest study, published Wednesday in Science…
In recent years, the party drug and anesthetic ketamine has been embraced as a rapidly-acting, if still off-label, medication for some cases of depression and suicidal ideation that don’t respond to other treatments. But there’s still much we don’t understand about how it actually works so quickly to treat the…
More people are dying from drug overdoses in the U.S. than ever before, according to a new preliminary report released Wednesday by the federal government. There were an estimated 72,287 drug overdose deaths last year, the report found, with the majority caused by opioids. The toll is yet another record high.
For the first time in U.S. history, a death row inmate has been killed with a lethal injection containing fentanyl, a potent drug at the heart of the ongoing opioid overdose crisis.
The State of New York is suing Purdue Pharma, one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of opioid painkillers, for what it says is the company’s role in driving the opioid crisis. On Tuesday morning, the attorney general’s office announced that it was filing a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company for…
Despite a growing awareness of the dangers and risks of opioid addiction among doctors and patients, the average amount of opioids prescribed to Americans over the past decade has barely budged, suggests a new study published Wednesday in The BMJ. But it’s difficult to know just how much this reality accounts for the…
Scientists are scrambling to find painkillers that can ease suffering without the addictive potential of opioids. One potential solution, a new study out Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine suggests, might involve creating modified versions of the common wrinkle treatment botox, otherwise known as botulinum…
Federal prosecutors have charged hundreds of people with allegedly defrauding the US government’s health care system out of a combined $2 billion. And many of the charged are doctors who are also being accused of aiding the opioid crisis by illegally prescribing more than 13 million doses of powerful, addictive…
A new study could revive an abandoned theory about how to treat narcolepsy, the thus-far incurable disorder that makes people chronically sleepy. And it could also provide a new lead on how to treat drug addiction.
The death toll of the US opioid crisis has been seriously lowballed, suggests a new study published Wednesday in Public Health Reports. It found that many states have failed to identify fatal drug overdoses specifically caused by opioid use over the past two decades. Since 1999, there might have been as many as 70,000…
The state of Massachusetts has filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma LP, the company that developed the semisynthetic opioid OxyContin in 1995 and aggressively marketed it while downplaying the risk of addiction. It’s part of a growing backlash to Purdue, a pharmaceutical giant the New Yorker characterized as an …
On Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health revealed its new plan to tackle the opioid crisis, which it dubbed the Helping to End Addiction Long-term, or HEAL, initiative. Among the ideas presented are research programs devoted to better understanding chronic pain, developing new non-opioid painkillers and addiction…
Walmart has announced that the company will roll out new restrictions on opioid prescriptions this summer at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, and will require e-prescriptions for opioids by the year 2020. The move comes as the opioid epidemic continues to kill more and more Americans every year.
Amidst the worsening opioid crisis—which killed more than 42,000 Americans in 2016 and even shortened US life expectancy—the federal head of public health has come out with a plea to the public: Learn how to use naloxone, the nasal spray that can reverse an opioid overdose, and carry around as much of it as you can.
Who you are is the result of a complicated interplay between your environment, your genes, and probably a few other factors science has yet to uncover. Genetics influence somewhere around half of a person’s “vulnerability to addiction,” according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Now, as opioid addiction has…
Purdue Pharmaceuticals, one of the companies which has made billions of dollars selling massive amounts of opioids across the country even as addiction rates and overdose deaths skyrocketed, has announced it will no longer be directly marketing the painkillers to U.S. doctors.
As doctors and scientists struggle to turn the tide of the opioid crisis, which killed more than 63,000 Americans in 2016, there are others looking further ahead, trying to create a world where addiction can’t take hold in the first place. One such approach, created by a team of scientists in the U.K., is a nasal…
The scale of the opioid crisis gripping the United States is hard to fathom. Since 2000, lethal overdoses from opioid use have tripled, and the problem is so widespread Centers for Disease Control researchers have concluded it is dragging down the national life expectancy. Though President Donald Trump has declared…
The United States has an opioid problem. Heroin overdose deaths rates have tripped since 2010 according to one report—and overall opioid overdose death rates have tripled since 2000. It’s not going away.
On Wednesday, Senator Claire McCaskill released a report on the findings of a congressional investigation into the practices of pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics. The jaw-dropping allegations detail the process in which agents systematically convinced insurers to pay for a highly-addictive opioid cancer pain…
