The Safe Opioid Prescribing Initiative

Doctors who over-prescribe OxyContin, Percocet and other narcotic painkillers known as opioids are widely seen as partly responsible for a dramatic rise in drug overdose deaths over the last two decades. Fatal overdoses kill more than 1,000 people a year in North Carolina and nearly half involve prescriptions written within 60 days of the victim’s death.

Regulators seeking to curb deaths are now using a statewide database to spot potentially reckless prescribing.