Congress has passed, and President Obama has signed, a bill aimed at the opioid addiction crisis — although no funding is attached to pay for the measures the bill contains.

Ironically, the crisis appears to be taking an outsized toll on women over 50, according to an article on Grandparents.com, which said that “[t]here has been a 450 percent increase in the number of deaths among women since 1999, in particular, a statistic attributed to opioid use.”

The article added that “the death rate for middle-aged women has spiked enormously” — since they are not only more likely to have chronic pain, but in treating them, doctors are more likely to give them prescription pain relievers and to do so in higher doses.