More than half of adults who are prescribed opioid painkillers save their left over pills for future use and may eventually share them with others, a new study says.
The study, by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, shows that almost half of the patients surveyed did not receive any instructions on how to safely store the drugs, either to keep them from young children who could accidentally take them, or from teens or other adults who could use the pills to get high.
Patients were also not informed on how to safely dispose of the drugs. Less than 7 percent of people who had left over pills reported returning the drugs to pharmacies, police, or the Drug Enforcement Administration through “take back” programs.
“These painkillers are much riskier than has been understood and the volume of prescribing and use has contributed to an opioid epidemic in this country,” said study leader Alene Kennedy-Hendricks.
She said it is not clear why patients that were surveyed have leftover pills, but it could be that they are prescribed more medication than they actually needed.
There has been a sharp increase in prescription painkiller addiction and overdose deaths. Opioids, including prescription opioid pain relievers and heroin, killed more than 28,000 people in 2014, the highest year recorded. At least half of all opioid overdose deaths involve a prescription opioid, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Deaths from prescription opioids—like oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone—have quadrupled since 1999. More than 40 people die daily from overdoses involving prescription opioids, says the CDC.
The survey, conducted in February and March 2015, included 1,032 adults in the United States who had used prescription painkillers in the previous year. During the time of the survey, 592 participants were no longer used prescription painkillers.
Out of those surveyed, 60.6 percent said they had leftover pills, and of them, 61.3 percent said they kept the pills for future use.
