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USA, banning free drug samples should be urgently considered by policymakers (13, 14). By now, opioids belong to the most widely-prescribed drug classes in the USA. The country faces an extreme situation since it constitutes only five percent of the world's population, but it consumes 56% of the world's opioid drugs (23).Opioid analgesic abuse is a complex and multifactorial problem. No single stakeholder can solve this crisis independently (24). In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) transformed the drug risks and benefits assessment and issued a series of guidance and the so called “risk minimization action plans” (RiskMAPs) including risk minimization tools offered to industry in order to achieve “specific health outcomes related to known safety risks” (25). In 2016, the FDA issued its Opioids Action Plan (26), aiming to reduce opioid prescription behavior through education programs. The corporate social responsibility of the pharmaceutical industry in the USA lacks. In its Opioid Action Plan, the FDA also aims to reexamine the underlying risk-benefit paradigm for opioids (14, 27). The pharmaceutical industry should contribute with its expertise in product abuse risk assessment, product communication and education, and cooperate with federal and state authorities, as well as with law enforcement authorities (24). They should implement product abuse and diversion procedures in their corporate mission statement, comparable as what the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) have introduced in the healthcare professional code (28).Already in 2003, collaborative initiatives had been set up to unite diverse investigator groups to cooperate in the field of pain research, such as the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN). Examples of pain management partnerships include the Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Chronic Pelvic Pain (MAPP) aiming to define an imaging-based signature for pelvic pain, or the Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry (CHOIR) wherein an open-source learning healthcare platform was used as a basis to develop a deep signature of individual patients across several dimensions of social, psychosocial, and physical functioning. This registry generated new insights about what leads to pain persistence and what drives pain in general. However, the setup of those partnerships was not broadly implemented (22) and certainly did not end the trend of the significant increase in non-medical use of prescription opioid analgesics in the USA.In order to boost collaboration, President Obama dedicated in 2016 more than 1 billion US Dollars to set up evidence-based prevention programs to support monitoring of prescription drugs, take-back events related to prescription drugs, and to facilitate the access to the overdose reversal drug naloxone (29).Tackling the prescription opioid abuse requires a joint effort of multiple stakeholders involved in the pain management process. Public-private partnership (PPP) models vary depending on the type of participants, the funding, the mission, and objectives (30).PPPs such as the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) (31) could serve as a role model in the fight against opioid addiction. The FDA could benefit from close collaboration with industry to review the system barriers and organizational issues in the regulatory system and work toward official action to end the practice of aggressive marketing strategies. The Orphan Products Grants Program of IRDiRC integrates industry, regulatory agencies and patient advocacy organizations to collaboratively develop recommendations for improved R&D and guidelines, regulation and patient involvement. The FDA jointly works with industry to define incentives including expedited reviews of new drug applications for alternative products, having tamper-resistant properties and support in the development of risk management plans (24). Furthermore, the reimbursement policies could be a subject of the regulatory science-based consortia, aiming to prevent addicted patients to turn to cheaper, but illegal alternatives which are more lethal.Collaborations should focus on