‘All Scientific Hands On Deck’ To End The Opioid Crisis

Third, we need safe, effective, non-addictive treatments to manage chronic pain. While there were nearly 20,000 overdoses in 2015 due to heroin or fentanyl, the trajectory of opioid addiction usually begins with prescription opioid misuse. Some people with opioid addiction began by taking diverted pills from friends and family members, but others began with an opioid prescription of their own. But simply reducing medical use (and thus supply) of addictive prescription opioids, as the CDC and other authorities have recently advised, does not address the very real problem of untreated pain in this country, and we cannot solve the opioid addiction and overdose crisis without better addressing pain at the same time. New pain treatments need to be developed, and the last few years have seen exciting developments in this area. For example, compounds called biased agonists that produce pain relief via the mu-opioid receptor but without the rewarding and respiratory depressing effects produced by currently approved opioid medications have recently shown promise in animal studies. Non-opioid-based approaches like cannabinoids, sodium channel blockers, gene therapies, and brain-stimulation technologies (such as transcranial magnetic stimulation [TMS], transcranial direct current stimulation, and electrical deep brain stimulation) also may lead to new therapeutics.