Opioids. This is a word that has garnered a lot of media attention lately. But what exactly are opioids and why are we so obsessed with them?

In the 2016 alone, opioid overdoses killed approximately 53,000 people in the U.S. — more than car crashes, which killed 35,000 people. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2016, 3.6 percent of adolescents aged 12-17 misuse opioids (about 900,000 adolescents).

When used correctly, opioids can ease pain for those who are suffering from chronic illnesses, cancer and injuries. But, when abused, opioids can cause side effects, some of which include fatigue, trouble breathing, chest pain and in the worst cases death.

Physical addiction to these substances can occur within four to six weeks, and psychological addiction can occur in as little as two days, which is part of the reason that abuse of opioids has reached such high levels.

On Jan. 9, 2018, three Nebraska legislature proposed bills that would take aim at opioid abuse and addiction. The laws imposed by these bills would include a length limit of seven days for opioid prescriptions for minors with some exceptions, the requirement of an ID when picking up opioid prescriptions, requiring doctors and other prescribers to educate patients getting opioid prescriptions about the dangers of addiction, as well as other methods which would help prevent drug abuse.

So, we have these statistics about how opioids are affecting us, but how did we get here? The simple answer is availability. Doctors prescribed too many of these drugs, and as a result of a lack of regulation with regards to their prescription, their use became became widespread. They were kept in everyday medicine cabinets, and teens looking to abuse them didn’t have to go very far out of their way. They eventually seeped into our culture, through our music and how we run our parties, rapidly popularizing their use.

“They just called them pill parties. Everybody was responsible to bring some pills and they would throw them in a bowl and people would just randomly take pills,” said Jeff Smith, a health teacher here at LSE.

Some of the bills proposed by the federal government, which are similar to the bills proposed here, are being pushed by legislators with hopes that they may be here by Memorial Day. We can only hope that such laws would help in decreasing the number of deaths in the U.S. from opioid usage today.