Crude estimates of prescription opioid-related misuse and use disorder populations towards informing intervention system need in Canada

Opioid-related harms – popularly dubbed the ‘opioid crisis’ – continue to negatively impact public health in Canada on an unprecedented scale, primarily as a consequence of years of excessive opioid prescribing (Fischer et al., 2016b; Fischer et al., 2017; Gladstone et al., 2015; Gomes et al., 2017). Concrete na tional population-level data on key parameters of opioid use and harms are available mainly for two major indicators: 1) ‘upstream’ (e.g., volume of prescription opioids (POs) dispensed medically, and 2) ‘downstream’ (e.g., opioid-related mortality and morbidity).
Source: Drug and Alcohol Dependence - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: research