Medical use of opioids not driver of overdoses

Below is a series of Twitter postings by @JohnTuckerPhD from April 22. where he lays out arguments, with excellent graphs, showing there’s no correlation between prescribing and overdosing.

I promised to send @raj_mehta the data behind our discussion of opiate prescribing-related harms yesterday. Apologies to those who have seen this data ad nauseum, but I am going to post it all here together.

The “pain pt becomes addicted, overdoses and dies” narrative is probably happening, but its at best a very minor component of the OD epidemic. The demographics of Rxing and ODing are very, very different.