Doctors and other health care providers still prescribe highly addictive pain medications at rates widely considered unsafe. Critics say the practice exposes tens of millions of patients each year to unnecessary risk of addiction, overdose and death.

Tracy Lee for NPR

Despite widespread devastation caused by America's opioid epidemic, an investigation by NPR found that doctors and other health care providers still prescribe highly addictive pain medications at rates widely considered unsafe.

Public data, including new government studies and reports in medical literature, shows enough prescriptions are being written each year for half of all Americans to have one.

Patients still receive more than twice the volume of opioids considered normal before the prescribing boom began in the late 1990s.

"We're 5% of the world's population, but we consume 80% of the world's prescription opioids," said Dr. Jonathan Chen, a physician and researcher at Stanford University Medical Center who studies prescribing patterns.

Critics say the practice exposes tens of millions of patients each year to unnecessary risk of addiction, overdose and death. It also floods communities with vast quantities of opioid medications that go unused, building up a deadly reservoir of drugs in home medicine cabinets that often wind up being abused.

"It's not just a handful of doctors doing it. We kind of all are. It's become part of our culture that this is normal," Chen said.

His view reflects a growing body of research by doctors and scientists who have begun to voice alarm about the lack of progress in scaling back medical opioid consumption.

A lot of pills, a lot of deaths

The peril for patients remains high. In 2018, the last year for which complete data is available, more than 1 in 5 Americans had an opioid prescription filled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

read more