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Can Medical Licensing Boards Swing the Pendulum Towards Judicious Opioid Prescribing Practices?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2024

Lewis S. Nelson Open the ORCID record for Lewis S. Nelson [Opens in a new window]  and
Jeanmarie Perrone
Lewis S. Nelson
Affiliation:
RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL, NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, USA
Jeanmarie Perrone
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA
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Extract

In the initial wave of the opioid crisis, uninformed prescribing practices and lax oversight were the drivers of opioid addiction and death. Although opioid prescriptions have decreased by 44.4 percent between 2011-2020,1 the number of deaths linked to prescription opioids has decreased only marginally.2 The marked fall in opioid prescribing without a concomitant reduction in opioid-related deaths suggests that an at-risk population continued to receive prescription opioids, whether directly or indirectly, from a medical professional. Currently, illicitly manufactured fentanyl (IMF) is the culprit for the majority of the approximately 81,000 annual opioid-related deaths.3 This finding has been misleadingly used to suggest that prescription opioids for chronic pain are no longer (and never were) a relevant concern,4 while the reality is that their lethal consequences are simply dwarfed by the marked rise in IMF deaths.5

Keywords

OpioidPrescribingAddictionPain MedicineMedical Licensing Board
Type
Commentary
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 52 , Issue 3: Emerging Technologies to Stop Biological Time: The Ethical, Legal & Policy Challenges of Advanced Biopreservation , Fall 2024 , pp. 690 - 692
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics

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