With federal NOPAIN Act, Maryland doctors, advocates hope fewer opioids will be prescribed

When Jennie Burke’s 13-year-old daughter needed hernia surgery six years ago, it wasn’t the operation Burke feared — it was her daughter’s recovery from it, and whether she’d need opioids to keep the pain at bay. At the time, Burke’s brother was “hitting rock bottom” from a heroin addiction that would later kill him. Like many Americans in the early 2000s, he became addicted to opioids after being prescribed OxyContin following an appendectomy. In 2020, the year he died, 68,630 people died from opioid overdoses.