In 2017, New York City-based Hospital for Special Surgery implemented a Controlled Substances Task Force to limit the risk of opioid misuse among the roughly 32,000 patients who undergo orthopedic surgeries at the hospital annually.

The overall drug overdose death rate in urban and rural U.S. counties nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2017, according to new CDC data reported by STAT.

A major hole in the healthcare system has many hospitals and health systems fueling the nation's opioid epidemic — unintentionally or not.

SpecGx, a subsidiary of Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, was the top opioid manufacturer between 2006 and 2012, accounting for 37.7 percent of the pills on the U.S. market, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data published by The Washington Post.

Boston is outfitting all the buildings owned by the city with opioid overdose emergency kits by the end of the year, according to The Boston Globe.

Global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. is facing criticism for its role in opioid marketing for Johnson & Johnson and Purdue Pharmaceuticals, The New York Times reports.

The USDA awarded $175,000 to Utah State University in Logan for opioid prevention, treatment and recovery services through telemedicine, St. George News reports.

About 2 percent of women prescribed opioid painkillers around the time of childbirth show signs of persistent opioid use following initial prescription, according to a study published July 26 in JAMA Network Open and reported by STAT.

Opioid-prescribing during hospital stays and at discharge may be higher in the United States than in other countries, according to a study published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

The National Institutes of Health plans to form a network, supported by $155 million in grants, to drive research on addiction treatment for opioid use disorder in criminal justice settings.

California received the largest amount of prescription painkillers between 2006 and 2012, with 8.1 billion pills distributed in the state over the six-year period, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data published by The Washington Post.

The Health Resources and Services Administration awarded a $200,000 grant to University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to develop a telehealth network for opioid abuse patients. 

Federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against former opioid distributor Miami-Luken and two of its former executives, according to The Washington Post. 

Forty percent of primary clinics said they would not accept a new patient who takes daily doses of Percocet, a prescription opioid, for chronic pain from a past injury, according to a study published July 12 in JAMA Open Network.

Overdose-related deaths have fallen for the first time since 1990, according to preliminary CDC data cited by The New York Times.

Patients who receive nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen, along with opioids after surgery may use fewer opioids than patients who only receive opioids, according to new research.

The University of Montana received a $3.3 million contract from NIH on July 9 to fund development of a vaccine against opioid addiction, according to ABC Fox Montana.

Limiting the supply of opioids and boosting access to treatment are just two parts of the equation to solve the national drug epidemic. The third, less mentioned part is harm reduction, according to Travis Rieder, PhD, a medical bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University's Berman Institute of Bioethics in Baltimore.

Two-thirds of drug deaths around the world were caused by opioids in 2017, and that proportion was even higher in the U.S., where overdose deaths reached a new high, according to a report from the United Nations.

Residents in 412 U.S. counties are twice as likely as residents in other counties to be at high risk for opioid overdose deaths, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open.