Family and friends - not drug dealers - are the most common source for abused prescription medication for the majority of abusers, a new study says.
More than one in four of the heaviest abusers said they got their pills from more than one doctor and nearly as many said they got them from family and friends, whereas 15 percent said they got them from dealers or other strangers.
Dr. Leonard Paulozzi notes that these abusers "are probably using at much greater volumes and simply asking a friend for a pill now and then is not going to be sufficient," according to The Associated Press.
Overall, the researchers found that two-thirds of all participants said they abused the drugs infrequently, and more than half of these said their pills came from friends and relatives.
In the study, published by the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, Paulozzi and CDC researchers compiled data from national health surveys over a four-year period.
Paulozzi, a researcher at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in the study that in recent years, about 12 million people - or one in 20 people over the age of 12 - have used nonprescription opioid painkillers.
A previous CDC report found that overdose deaths from nonmedical opioids tripled from 1999 to 2010, with more than 16,000 deaths that year. In contrast, there were less than 8,000 heroin and cocaine overdose deaths combined in 2010.
A different study conducted in Tennessee showed that from 2007 to 2011, one-third of the population filled an opioid prescription. About 8 percent obtained the medication from four different prescribers and were six times more likely to suffer from a fatal overdose compared to prior years.
Paulozzi notes that the study's results don't indicate where or how these family and friends obtained their prescriptions. But he and the other CDC researchers involved urge patients with legitimate painkiller prescriptions not to share them with others.
