How Exercise Can Help Tackle the Opioid Crisis

The mindset to endure could offer a path to freedom from drugs

Exercise is recommended as an effective non-opioid strategy for non-cancer pain such as fibromyalgia and chronic low back pain. Yet most adults living with chronic pain do not exercise. Or they exercise very little. Shutterstock

President Donald Trump is calling for high-intensity drug traffickers to face the death penalty in the United States as part of a new plan to tackle the opioid epidemic.

The misuse of opioids has reached crisis levels across North America. Every day in 2016, 116 Americans died from opioid-related drug overdoses. And almost 1,500 Canadians died from such overdoses during the first half of 2017.