Published 31 July 2025
Dependency Forming Medicines 2024/25 - Statistical Summary Narrative
Summary
This publication describes the prescribing and dispensing of dependency-forming medicines in a primary care setting in England. It does not include data on medicines used in secondary care, prisons, or issued by a private prescriber.
This publication was developed in response to the Public Health England (PHE) review of dependence and withdrawal associated with some prescribed medicines, also known as the prescribed medicines review (PMR) (PDF: 2.9 MB). Included within its recommendation was the increased availability and use of data on the prescribing of medicines that can cause dependence.
This publication provides a national view of prescribing of dependency forming medications for the use of policy makers, the general public and other users. It can be used for research and evidence when answering high-level questions.
This release includes metrics on the volume and cost of prescribing of dependency forming medications and various demographic breakdowns and breakdowns by Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) quintiles. Geographical breakdowns by integrated care boards (ICBs) are included in the supporting summary tables.
This is an experimental Official Statistics release.
Key findings:
In England in 2024/25:
There were 67 million items for dependency-forming medicines prescribed to an estimated 7 million identified patients.
Opioid drugs were the most prescribed dependency-forming medicines with 39 million items at a cost of £270 million.
The cost of dependency-forming medicines prescribed was £366 million. This represents a 53% decrease from 2015/16.
The decline in cost is mainly due to:
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A 79% decline in the total cost of gabapentoid prescribing since 2015/16. This was mainly due to a steep decline between 2016/17 and 2018/19 when pregabalin came off patent, which meant cheaper generic equivalents could be prescribed from August 2017.
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A 36% decrease in the total cost of opioid drugs since 2015/16. There was a sharp decline between 2015/16 and 2018/19, followed by a continued gentler downward trend.
Prescribing of dependency-forming medicines was most prevalent in female patients aged 60 to 64 years, with 422,000 identified patients.
The most deprived areas had 57% more identified patients receiving dependency-forming medications than the least deprived areas.
Resource list:
Costs and items financial year summary tables(Excel:498 KB)Costs and items calendar year summary tables (Excel:459 KB)Costs and items quarterly summary tables (Excel:2.32 MB)Co-prescribing summary tables (Excel:59 KB)Background information and methodology note (HTML)
Pre-release access list (HTML)
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- Responsible statistician: Graham Platten