With overdose deaths from opiods setting a record in the city last year, the health commissioner is calling on doctors to help solve the problem by prescribing fewer painkillers. NY1's Erin Billups filed the following report.

Two hundred and seventy-seven people in Brooklyn died from overdoses of heroin and other opioids last year. 

Dr. Lawrence Brown has a front row seat to the epidemic. He says physicians bear some blame.

"We are seeing the consequence of a decades-long change in the perception, by physicians on how to treat pain," Brown said. "Providers have been undertrained with respect to identification and how to respond to persons where there is a risk of a substance use disorder."

The city's health commissioner says she agrees, adding the over-prescription of painkillers like Oxycontin has changed the typical overdose victim. In Brooklyn, the toll is now greatest among older white and Hispanic men in places like Bensonhurst and Coney Island.

"This is a real shift in what the kind of imagined description was of a person who was going to die of an opioid," said Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett.

Starting at Coney Island Hospital, the health commissioner asked doctors not to routinely prescribe opioids to patients dealing with non-cancer related pain, and when they do, to limit supply to three days.

"Most acute pain, you only need three days worth of painkillers. The median days of supply has increased in Brooklyn from 23 days, which is a long supply, to 25 days," Bassett said.

Doctors here acknowledged that addiction to painkillers has become a gateway to street drugs, especially fentanyl-laced heroin.

"If the evidence clearly shows that we've been prescribing too much and that has lead to this problem, then we reassess and we learn to prescribe less," said Dr. Terence Brady, associate chief medical officer for NYC Health + Hospitals/Coney Island.

Brown says the new focus on the epidemic is bittersweet. 

"Many people have lost their lives, families have been upheaved and communities have been destroyed for decades. And yet, it's only because it's having a more widespread impact on communities outside of communities of color that we're getting the attention we're currently getting," he said.

Our response now is what it should always have been. I am very pleased that we are looking with empathy on people who have dependence, saying that they need help, not punishment," Bassett said. "And we have the tools to make sure people have more access to care."

The Health Department hopes to meet with 1,000 doctors in Brooklyn by July.

A simliar effort in the Bronx and on Staten Island has led to a drop in opioid prescriptions.