Pain patients on opioids also are getting rescue drug naloxone to prevent overdose

Increasingly, pain patients who need high doses of opioids are getting another medicine prescribed alongside them: the overdose-reversing spray naloxone, more often associated with illicit drug use.

According to a new report from Kaiser Health News, a handful of states — including Ohio, which, with Pennsylvania, is one of the states hit hardest by the overdose crisis — now require physicians to prescribe naloxone along with high doses of opioids or to pain patients who have dealt with substance use disorder.