Thank you for your question. Opioids and their role in pain treatment are an ongoing discussion in pain management. On one site are they are potent pain relievers primarily in acute pain but to some extent also in chronic pain. On the other site the risk for misuse and addiction (not the same), and it seems that there are a growing numbers of deaths based on use of opioids especially in US.
Here on the Picture of Pain blog this subject have been covered several times from different angles and will be in the future. You can find a list of previous post from the blog at the link below. Do you have specific concerns ?
http://blog.dolotest.com/tag/opioids/

Thanks
Kim