Many primary care physicians – the top prescribers of prescription pain pills in the United States – do not understand basic facts about how people may abuse the drugs or how addictive different formulations of the medications can be, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.

This lack of understanding may be contributing to the ongoing epidemic of prescription opioid abuse and addiction in the U.S.

Reporting online June 23 in the Clinical Journal of Pain, the researchers found that nearly half of the internists, family physicians, and general practitioners surveyed incorrectly thought that abuse-deterrent pills – such as those formulated with physical barriers to prevent their being crushed and snorted or injected – were actually less addictive than their standard counterparts. In fact, the pills are equally addictive.