It Only Feels Like You're Dying.

• Position: Opioid abuse and drug withdrawal symptoms

An estimated 53,332 of 64,070 lethal overdoses in a recent 12-month span have been linked to opioids of some type, indicates Nick Szubiak, a clinical social worker for the National Council for Behavioral Health. He says that the epidemic is being fueled--at least partially--by the myth started via a 1980 letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine that opioids are nonaddictive. In addition to that, there has been unrestricted prescribing of medications, and an increase of availability and potency of less expensive heroin.

Lantie Jorandby is board certified in addiction psychiatry. She is with the Amen Clinics in the Washington, D.C., area. Having been involved in Medical Assistance Treatment clinics providing suboxone and methadone within the Veterans Administration, Jorandby has observed "egregious overprescribing in the primary care setting in the VA system."

This overprescribing, she maintains, usually is performed by "well-meaning" doctors getting stuck in a cycle of prescribing dangerously high levels of opiates. 'The system perpetuates when patients complain that their doctors want to stop their opiates, putting doctors in a bind with their jobs." She has heard "reports of patients threatening doctors if they try to take them off of opiates, creating a perfect storm." Many people are prescribed a full 60-pill prescription, when a few pills would do the trick.

Explaining that the medical community has been trained to prescribe for longer periods of time like 10 to 30 days, Carolyn Castro-Donlan has been working with addiction patients since the 1980s when she was a nurse. At present, she is a consultant collaborating on medical assisted treatment using suboxone for maintenance, detox, or helping patients taper off opioids.

Castro-Donlan emphasizes that the withdrawal symptoms will not kill you, even though it feels like they will when you are going through it, and it just might be the best way to get someone to quit. She suggests that one of the biggest problems is prescription monitoring across states lines is inadequate and needs to be universal. Often, she points out, this is how addictions can be perpetuated.

Both women agree that there is way too much overprescribing of opioids, so perhaps we should find a way to train differently in this area and/or regulate how much...