The Opioid Epidemic in the United States—Overview, Origins, and Potential Solutions

Abstract

(Abstracted from Cancer 2018;124:4279–4286)

Over the last 20 years, there has been a staggering increase in addiction to opiates and the number of deaths from opioids in the United States. The initial trigger for the epidemic was a letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 (N Engl J Med 1980;302:123), which reported that fewer than 1% of 11,000 patients who received opioids in a hospital setting became addicted.