UF: Some good news on opioid epidemic: Treatment options are expanding

UF psychiatry professors William Greene and Lisa J. Merlo-Greene write that while health care claims for an opioid dependence diagnosis rose more than 3,000 percent from 2007 to 2014, medical knowledge about addiction and a social and political will to fight it are expanding as well.

In the past two decades, the devastation associated with opioid addiction has escaped the relative confines of the inner city and extended to suburban and rural America. Due in large part to the proliferation of prescription pain relievers, rates of opioid abuse, addiction, overdose and related deaths have increased dramatically. This has affected families and communities that once felt immune to this crisis.