Powered by a rise in doctor prescribed narcotic overdoses, prescription drug fatalities now exceed traffic deaths in America, a Times examination of federal government data found.



Prescription drugs surpassed automobile accidents as a contributing factor to death in '09, eradicating no less than 37,485 persons nationally, based on initial data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.



While many key factors of preventable loss of life are decreasing, prescription medication is an exception. The death toll has more than doubled over the last 10 years, now claiming a life just about every forteen minutes. In comparison, traffic mishaps have already been decreasing for decades on account of huge investment strategies in automotive safety.



Public health specialists have applied the comparability to highlight the nation's escalating doctor prescribed pharmaceutical dilemma, which they define being a crisis. This is actually the very first time that drugs have accounted for more deaths than traffic crashes ever since the federal government began keeping track of drug-induced fatalities in 1979.



Pushing the upturn in deaths are health professional prescribed pain, stress and anxiety prescription drugs that happen to be powerful, extremely hard to kick and particularly hazardous when combined together or along with other alcohol or drugs. Being among the most commonly over used are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma. One particular relative newbie to the prescription drug arena is Fentanyl, a painkiller which comes by means of patches and lollipops which is 100 times much stronger than morphine.



These kinds of prescription drugs now result in much more fatalities than heroin and cocaine combined.