To humanize the crisis, NSC turned data into faces-engraving the faces of the 22,000 moms, dads, sons, and daughters that die each year from prescription opioid overdoses onto 22,000 pills. These pills formed a powerful installation, a memorial that told stories on an individual level, painted a picture of the lives lost, and put a face to the problem.

The memorial didn't stop with one location, it was built to travel. And it's still on the move, visiting the cities that are the hardest hit by the opioid crisis.

After bringing people face-to-face with the problem, NSC gave them a way to take action starting with another statistic: 1 out of 3 prescription opioid users don't even know their medication includes an opioid. A simple insurance card sticker prompted conversation with medical professionals, just one small step toward preventing another 22,000 deaths.

Prescribed to Death sparked a national conversation about the prescription opioid problem in the US. The campaign garnered 2,455,606,809+ earned impressions to date, 12,990,351+ video views and a 2,017% increase in shared Facebook impressions.

Through earned PR alone, 15 cities hardest hit by the crisis heard about the memorial and asked to host it. The White House was so moved that they brought it to Washington DC, hosting it on the National Mall. In a divisive political climate, the campaign united both parties, with prominent leaders of both visiting the memorial.

The campaign established NSC as a leader in the fight against prescription opioid overdoses. Conversation about NSC grew by 891% on the days of the memorial and 3663% when the DC memorial was announced.

Most importantly, the campaign inspired a new behavior. With 1,021,000+ Warn Me Labels distributed, Prescribed To Death sparked potentially life-saving conversations with medical professionals nationwide.

NSC conducted a national survey and found that while 87% of Americans believe opioid overdoses are a national crisis, they aren't worried about their own risk for addiction, and they are definitely not concerned about the potential abuse of prescriptions. Overdosing was perceived as a problem for someone else, "addicts," and something done with illegal street drugs, not prescriptions. This was shocking considering 3 out of 5 of them had prescription opioids in their own homes.

We needed to educate Americans and make them understand that the threat was sitting in their own medicine cabinets, not out on the streets. We needed to humanize the crisis to help people recognize their own vulnerability to opioid addiction. And we needed to activate that moment of recognition, by giving them a simple protective action that would activate a life-saving behavior.

Prescription opioids kill over 22,000 Americans each year, yet they rarely make the news. Media coverage of the opioid epidemic was all about heroin and fentanyl, not prescriptions. The deaths of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Prince gave prescriptions a blip of national attention, but it never lasted.

National Safety Council's mission is to eradicate preventable deaths, and they recognized that this was a national killer no one was talking about. Prescription opioids were one of the most pressing barriers to attaining the sustainable development goal of good health and well being for Americans. When NSC fielded a survey on drug abuse in the US, they realized how many Americans were at risk - prescription opioids were in 3 out of 5 homes in America. The NSC needed to break through the noise on illegal street opioids with something that would get Americans to take the threat in their own home seriously. We needed something emotional that would force Americans to confront their own vulnerability to addiction and motivate them to protect themselves from risk of overdosing.