By Barry Meier Purdue Pharma, the company that planted the seeds of the opioid epidemic through its aggressive marketing of OxyContin, has long claimed it was unaware of the powerful opioid painkiller’s growing abuse until years after it went on the market. But a copy of a confidential Justice Department report shows that federal prosecutors investigating [...]

By Lisa Rapaport The surge in U.S. kids taking medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is having an unintended side effect, a new study suggests: more children and teens are overdosing on these drugs. Nationwide, U.S. Poison Control Centers received more than 156,000 calls about exposures to ADHD drugs among youth 19 years old and [...]

BY MELISSA TASSÉ Let’s start with the obvious. Our nation is suffering from the scourge of an opioid epidemic—in the form of addiction to opioid-based painkillers and heroin — that is creating anxiety, fear, and hopelessness among families and communities, while representing the leading cause of natural death in our country. Now, let’s discuss what [...]

By Gaby Galvin A NEW STUDY IS SOUNDING the alarm about misuse of medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There were 156,365 calls to poison control centers for people under 20 who were improperly exposed to ADHD medication from 2000 through 2014, according to the study published in the journal Pediatrics. The number of calls surged between 2000 and 2011 [...]

By Martha Bebinger The tall, gangly man twists a cone of paper in his hands as stories from nearly 30 years of addiction pour out: the robbery that landed him in prison at 17; never getting his GED; going through the horrors of detox, maybe 40 times, including this latest, which he finished two weeks [...]

By Evan Hughes Selling drugs is a relationship business. It’s best to do it in person. That is why, on a summer evening in 2012, Alec Burlakoff was out for dinner with Steven Chun, the owner of Sarasota Pain Associates. Burlakoff was a sales manager for Insys Therapeutics, an Arizona-based pharmaceutical company with only one [...]

By SARAH KARLIN-SMITH and BRIANNA EHLEY The crackdown on opioids is having unintended consequences. The push for fewer opioid prescriptions at lower doses and for shorter periods has increased suffering for some pain patients including those near the end of life. The emphasis on opioids has also overshadowed other forms of substance abuse that require attention. With fatal [...]

By Dave Sharos U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams believes the problem of opioid addiction is not only affecting the nation’s health, but the economy and our security as well. “The facts are that seven out of 10 of our young people between the ages of 18 and 24 are ineligible to serve in the military [...]

By Ethan Siegel If you want to know what's dangerous to Americans, the place to look is the CDC: the Centers for Disease Control. Studying all causes of death, disease, and preventative measures, they're the most important health agency in the country. Their purview extends from yellow fever to influenza to suicide to addiction and binge [...]

By Jake Harper In a refrigerator in the coroner's office in Marion County, Ind., rows of vials await testing. They contain blood, urine and vitreous, the fluid collected from inside a human eye. In overdose cases, the fluids may contain clues for investigators. "We send that off to a toxicology lab to be tested for [...]