For decades, talk about the dangers of drug addiction meant cocaine and heroin. Today, when people talk about drug addiction and deadly overdoses they are often talking about prescription drugs, most often painkillers.

Recent studies reveal that more people are dying from prescription drug abuse than from heroin and cocaine combined. A recent study by Trust for America’s Health found that deaths from prescription drugs more than doubled from 1999 to 2010. Today, more people die from prescription drugs than in car accidents.

For a decade or more, abuse of prescription pain medications has been well known. The deadly consequences of abuse of OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin have been reported across the country. Sham medical or pain clinics, particularly in Florida, have been exposed by investigative journalists. The practice of “doctor shopping” to overfill pain pill prescriptions is another well-known abuse of the system.

In long-overdue action, proposals in Washington, D.C. and Harrisburg offer hope that these abuses — and the deadly results — can be curbed.

In Washington, the Food and Drug Administration announced plans to shift drugs containing hydrocodone to a higher level of control, known as Schedule II. The problem this move would address is that drugs containing hydrocodone, the key ingredient in OxyContin, were not tightly controlled if the hydrocodone was mixed with other nonaddictive painkiller medications such as aspirin or acetaminophen.

It’s a logical move by the FDA. But it’s also late in coming — the federal Drug Enforcement Agency saw abuses of these mixed-ingredient painkillers and asked the FDA in 2004 to change the rules, to shift to Schedule II from the less-controlled Schedule III. Abuse problems were reported to federal officials years earlier. In 1999, a doctor in upstate New York, near Syracuse, filed a formal request asking federal agencies to crack down on what he saw as widespread abuse of legal narcotics such as Vicodin.

Whether it is due to bureaucratic bungling or pressure by big pharmaceutical companies fighting any change that might dampen their profits from these heavily prescribed painkillers is not clear. Whatever the reason, the consequences of the decade of delay has meant millions more people are addicted and thousands are dead from overdoses.

The new rules would limit patients to a 90-day supply without seeing a doctor for a new prescription. The shift to Schedule II also will increase storage and record-keeping requirements, with the objective of identifying doctors or pharmacies writing or filling extraordinary numbers of prescriptions for these commonly abused painkillers.

In Pennsylvania, the House of Representatives passed a bill with a 191-7 vote, that would create a statewide database to track prescription drugs. The idea is to help identify, track and stop people who abuse prescription pain killers by doctor shopping or pharmacy shopping. The database might also help authorities locate and also shut down so-called pill mills that dispense powerful pain killers at excessive levels more connected to profits than medical need.

It’s important to note that many people need these drugs to manage chronic pain or for post-surgery recovery. But the medical-industrial-complex has for too long allowed this drug use to expand beyond any legitimate medical need because of drugmakers’ profits, apathy or crooked doctors. That must change.

The efforts at the state and federal levels are overdue, but still welcome. Using database information to track and identify painkiller use should allow law enforcement to reverse the troubling and deadly trends in abuse of prescription painkillers.