Opioids are opium-like drugs which are commonly used as analgesics to treat moderate to severe pain. Apoptosis is a type of programmed cell death to remove unnecessary or damaged cells in an organism. Recently, the ability of opioids to induce apoptosis especially in cancer cell lines hasgained the interest of many researchers. This fascinating finding hasled to more testing of different kindsof opioids against different kindsof cancer cell lines in the course to search for the potential anticancer drugs. This review provides current information about opioids and apoptosis, and more importantly the compilations of researches over the years on how opioids are related to apoptotic cells death.