The number of opioid painkillers prescribed last year dropped by the largest rates in 25 years, new data show.
IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, a health data firm, released a report that showed an 8.9 percent drop on average in the number of prescription opioids, such as OxyContin or Vicodin, that were filled by retail and mail-order pharmacies.
All states and the District of Columbia were evaluated for the study and had declines of more than 5 percent. Eighteen states had declines above 10 percent, including Pennsylvania and West Virginia, two states that are among the top five in the country with the highest rates of drug overdose deaths.
The prescribing drop was 2 percentage points lower than the drop in 2016 and represented a 7.8 percent decline in new patients receiving prescriptions for opioids.
The data also show that the number of people who were prescribed medication to treat addiction, which helps stave off withdrawal symptoms, rose to 82,000 a month, nearly doubling.
“This suggests that healthcare professionals are prescribing opioids less often for pain treatment, but they are actively prescribing [medication-assisted treatment] to address opioid addiction,” said Murray Aitken, the data firm’s senior vice president.
Prescriptions for opioids rose in the 1990s as doctors provided them to patients who were suffering from pain. As addiction and death from overdoses began to climb, government regulators issued more restrictions and waged public awareness campaigns.
Despite those changes and the reduction in prescriptions, deaths from opioids have continued to rise, partly because people replace prescription painkillers with heroin, a cheaper, more available alternative. Government data show that 80 percent of people who take heroin first abused prescription painkillers. Deaths also have surged because heroin is being mixed with fentanyl, a more potent opioid that drug users often don’t know they are taking.
Overdoses from opioids killed more than 42,000 people in 2016, a fivefold increase from roughly two decades earlier. Government data show that roughly 2 million people in the U.S. are addicted to prescription opioids.
