Balancing a country’s need to make prescription drugs available to those in need while simultaneously curbing nonmedical use is one of our greatest challenges, according to a perspective article just published by Silvia Martins, MD, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a colleague at American University of Beirut. The article published in World Psychiatry , the journal of the World Psychiatric Association, cites research finding increased rates of deaths worldwide from prescription opioids as high as 550 percent depending on country and time-period.