WASHINGTON — New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention find opioid prescriptions are down nationwide, but are still overprescribed.

Baltimore City Health Commissioner Leana Wen said it’s good news that opioid prescriptions are down in the State of Maryland from the high of 2010, but doctors are still too quick to prescribe opioid drugs. She said the over-prescription of the highly addictive drug continues to be a huge problem.

“There are enough prescriptions for opioids given so that every adult American can have their own bottle,” Wen said.

Nearly 700 Baltimore City residents died from opioid overdose, said Wen, and even though the state awarded more money for the opioid reversal drug naloxone just last week, they can’t keep up with demands.

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Baltimore City will get $2 million to open a 24-hour "sobering center" to help those addicted to drugs, part of a larger pool of money the state is giving out to every county to fight the heroin and opioid epidemic.

The Governor's Office of Crime Control & Prevention announced Friday how the more than $22 million would be distributed among the state's 24 jurisdictions. The money comes from funds the governor committed to fight the opioid epidemic, the federal government's 21st Century Cures Act and the state's crime control and prevention agency.

Eighty percent of the $22 million will go to local jurisdictions; the rest will be used to fund other efforts and programs, including collaboration between federal, state and local law enforcement, to increase state regulatory oversight of controlled dangerous substances, increase the number of beds in residential drug treatment centers, and make improvements to the statewide crisis hotline

The city health department will also receive $750,000 to buy 20,000 doses of naloxone, the drug used to reverse an opioid overdose that health officials have had to ration because of a shortage. The city will get another $830,429 to fund treatment programs and other efforts to curb the number of opioid deaths and overdoses. City officials can also apply for grants that would make them eligible for up to $6 million in total funding, said Katie Kuehn, communications director with the state's opioid operational command center. The grant money is not guaranteed, however.

City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen said that although the money would help efforts to fight the opioid epidemic, the city should have received a larger proportion because it has been hit harder by the crisis than any other jurisdiction.

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As newer and stronger synthetic opioids and synthetic opioid combinations continue to cause overdose flare-ups across the United States, Crime labs are working to identify these unfamiliar drugs.

A new report from STAT examined the issue. Here are five key takeaways from the report.

1. While the opioid analogs fentanyl and carfentanil — an elephant tranquilizer lethal for humans in minute doses — are now widely known, new analogs are cropping up in communities scattered across the nation.

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5. In Baltimore, firefighters responding to 911 calls and emergency room physicians now report sudden upticks in opioid overdoses to Leana Wen, MD, the city's health commissioner, who can dispatch outreach teams to hard-hit areas of the city in the same day.

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Fewer opioid painkillers are being prescribed to patients in half of U.S. counties, including most in Maryland, in recent years, but the amount remains three times what it was in 1999, according to new figures released Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC and other public health officials have sought to curb prescriptions of these potent, but addictive painkillers because they are seen as a key contributor to the nationwide overdose epidemic. Users become hooked on them and later turn to cheaper and more deadly street drugs such as heroin.

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