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For the first time in US history, more people died in a single year from drug overdoses than in car accidents, and the majority of them didn't fall victim to the sort of drugs you would think around Thirty three thousand of these deaths resulted from the misuse of drugs that were manufactured legally in shiny code enforced factories.

And they've got names you've probably seen before in the medicine cabinets of your friends and family.

Percocet, vicodin, and OxyContin.

They are opioid painkillers.

Recent survey results published in the Annals of Internal Medicine shed some light on why opioid misuse is becoming such a problem in the United States.

According to the team of researchers at the U S Department of Health and Human Services, ninety one point eight million Americans used prescription opioids in twenty fifteen.

That is more than a third of the country's adult population, and more than eleven point five million Americans reported they missed used them, meaning they took them without a valid prescription.

That's a full four point six percent of our entire adult population, and one point nine million of those people admitted to having a use disorder.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health is conducted annually, but fifteen was the first year researchers included questions specifically about the use of prescription opioids.

The team surveyed fifty one thousand, two hundred non institutionalized civilian adults from all fifty states, and what they found was a arming for starters.

Sixty of the survey participants who reported misusing prescription opioids said their motivation for taking the drugs was pain management, and of the survey participants who reported misuse in nearly sixty said the drugs weren't prescribed to them and said they first acquired the drugs from family or friends.

Now, while pop culture can conjure images of back alley deals, this misuse can be as simple as a mother giving her daughter a pill to help ease some temporary intense pain, or a college student, for instance, getting a pill from a roommate.

Although the investigators expected the prescription rates for opioid pain killers to be high, they concluded that doctors are prescribing too much medicine and providing pain management drugs for excessive amounts of time.

Their suggestion is cutting back on the amount and frequency of prescriptions to try to help lower the number of overdoses.

Today's episode of brain Stuff was written by Jeslyn Shields, produced by Dylan Fagan, and for more on this and other topics, please visit us at how Stuff Works dot mus