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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff,

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Speaker 1: it's Christian seger In. For the first time in US history,

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Speaker 1: more people died in a single year from drug overdoses

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Speaker 1: than in car accidents, and the majority of them didn't

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Speaker 1: fall victim to the sort of drugs you would think

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Speaker 1: around Thirty three thousand of these deaths resulted from the

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Speaker 1: misuse of drugs that were manufactured legally in shiny code

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Speaker 1: enforced factories. And they've got names you've probably seen before

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Speaker 1: in the medicine cabinets of your friends and family. Percocet, vicodin,

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Speaker 1: and OxyContin. They are opioid painkillers. Recent survey results published

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Speaker 1: in the Annals of Internal Medicine shed some light on

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Speaker 1: why opioid misuse is becoming such a problem in the

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Speaker 1: United States. According to the team of researchers at the

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Speaker 1: U S Department of Health and Human Services, ninety one

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Speaker 1: point eight million Americans used prescription opioids in twenty fifteen.

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Speaker 1: That is more than a third of the country's adult population,

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Speaker 1: and more than eleven point five million Americans reported they

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Speaker 1: missed used them, meaning they took them without a valid prescription.

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Speaker 1: That's a full four point six percent of our entire

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Speaker 1: adult population, and one point nine million of those people

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Speaker 1: admitted to having a use disorder. The National Survey on

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Speaker 1: Drug Use and Health is conducted annually, but fifteen was

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Speaker 1: the first year researchers included questions specifically about the use

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Speaker 1: of prescription opioids. The team surveyed fifty one thousand, two

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Speaker 1: hundred non institutionalized civilian adults from all fifty states, and

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Speaker 1: what they found was a arming for starters. Sixty of

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Speaker 1: the survey participants who reported misusing prescription opioids said their

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Speaker 1: motivation for taking the drugs was pain management, and of

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Speaker 1: the survey participants who reported misuse in nearly sixty said

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Speaker 1: the drugs weren't prescribed to them and said they first

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Speaker 1: acquired the drugs from family or friends. Now, while pop

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Speaker 1: culture can conjure images of back alley deals, this misuse

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Speaker 1: can be as simple as a mother giving her daughter

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Speaker 1: a pill to help ease some temporary intense pain, or

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Speaker 1: a college student, for instance, getting a pill from a roommate.

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Speaker 1: Although the investigators expected the prescription rates for opioid pain

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Speaker 1: killers to be high, they concluded that doctors are prescribing

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Speaker 1: too much medicine and providing pain management drugs for excessive

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Speaker 1: amounts of time. Their suggestion is cutting back on the

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Speaker 1: amount and frequency of prescriptions to try to help lower

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Speaker 1: the number of overdoses. Today's episode of brain Stuff was

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Speaker 1: written by Jeslyn Shields, produced by Dylan Fagan, and for

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Speaker 1: more on this and other topics, please visit us at

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Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot mus