No way around it: Pain, which accompanies so many diseases and injuries, demands attention. But recent attempts to ease chronic pain with powerful prescription narcotics have gone wrong, horribly so.

Big Pharma’s profiteering, physicians’ lax prescribing, and misguided good intentions all around have become a lethal prescription for tens of thousands of Americans who have been inundated with potent painkillers.

This has created an opioid drug abuse epidemic, one of the deadliest public health scourges to afflict the nation in recent times. We need to reckon with its carnage — and figure out how to stop it. The path forward has many avenues. This month, we explore some of the most promising.