Members of the National Governors Association came to Washington for their annual winter meeting with President Obama Monday, armed with a plan to restrict access to prescription painkillers and end the country’s deadly opioid epidemic.

But the proposal, which drew bipartisan support from within the NGA over the weekend, received a less-than-enthusiastic response when presented to the president.

“If we go to doctors right now and say ‘Don’t overprescribe’ without providing some mechanisms for people in these communities to deal with the pain that they have or the issues that they have, then we’re not going to solve the problem, because the pain is real, the mental illness is real,” Obama said during his meeting with the governors Monday. “In some cases, addiction is already there.”

According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 47,055 people died from a drug overdose in the U.S. in 2014 — more than any other year on record. Some 61 percent of those fatal overdoses involved opioids, mostly prescription painkillers like OxyContin or Percocet, and heroin. 

According to the CDC, “Health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for painkillers in 2012, enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills.”