Editorial: New drug guidelines should be a top priority
A federal agency’s effort to help curb the deadly impact of opioid use by the American public has run into a sizable obstacle – one that we hope won’t become permanent.
At issue were new prescribing guidelines for potent opioid painkillers such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet, the type of drugs linked to alarming increases in overdoses and overdose deaths. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has worked to develop the guidelines and was scheduled to finalize them next month.
But then came the pushback from the companies that make those drugs and from lobbying groups funded by those companies. Even some officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration apparently began feeling a little territorial and also criticized the CDC for its proposed guidelines, according to a report by The Associated Press.
The result? The CDC recently dropped its January target date. Now, the CDC will open its proposals for public comment for 30 days, prompting advocacy groups pushing for the guidelines to worry that the proposal may be abandoned altogether.
Let’s hope that won’t be the case.
The CDC’s proposed guidelines, which would not be binding upon physicians, calls for doctors to prescribe opioid drugs only as a last choice for chronic pain, after first having patients try non-opioid pain relievers, physical therapy and other options. The proposal also calls upon doctors to prescribe initially the smallest supply of the drugs possible, just enough for a few days to handle acute pain.
Considering how addictive these painkillers are and their potentially harmful effects, the proposed guidelines make perfect sense. But not to those who stand to make a lot of money; total sales of these pain medications amounted to more than $9 billion last year, the AP reported.
The groups opposed to the guidelines say they were developed in secrecy and have criticized the CDC for not making public the names of people and organizations involved. That may have been a tactical blunder by the CDC, but not sufficient cause to abandon the guidelines.
Nor is the criticism last month from FDA officials and other health agencies at a meeting of pain experts. They described the guidelines as “shortsighted” and relying on “low-quality evidence.”
It’s unclear exactly what kind of evidence those FDA officials were looking for, but Tri-State residents see repeated evidence of what the current climate for prescribing opioid painkillers has done. West Virginia has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation, and the Huntington region has been hit particularly hard this year by overdoses and more than 90 overdose deaths. A majority of those deaths are linked to opioid painkillers, while most of the others are tied to heroin use. And as CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden has noted, the widespread availability of opioid painkillers means more Americans are “primed” for herion use.
West Virginia’s senior U.S. senator, Joe Manchin, is unhappy about the delay, particularly FDA officials’ resistance to the proposed guidelines. In a letter to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, he cites the alarming statistics showing a 16 percent increase in prescription-opioid deaths between 2013 and 2014, and the deaths of nearly 19,000 people due to prescription drugs last year alone. He urged Burwell’s agencies, including the FDA, to get behind what he called a unified effort to reduce the abuse of opioid drugs.
If those agencies truly have the public’s interest at heart, they will side with responsible guidelines for prescribing opioids rather than the companies who are making billions off the sale of these deadly drug
Filed under: General Problems
Aren’t West Virginia and Alaska the states with the highest suicide rates?
How can guidelines be set strictly on speculations?
What about the real chronic pain suffer. Iam a chronic pain suffer, if they make this law it a war on the real pain suffer. A drug seeker will get high no matter what. But we the true pain suffer has to suffer dibilitating pain with no relief. I will most definitely committ suicide. And thousands more like me will do the same thing. So the junkie survives but we have to take our lives so the drug addict can still get high. Ant that a Bitch.
I belong to an advocacy group that is fighting for proper access to Medical pain management. No one is funding our efforts. No big pharma company has a gold star group and said here’s some cash so you can fight the CDC. People that want to use and abuse drugs will always find a substitute. Simple supply and demand economics 101. But you’re not thinking about the people that have severe debilitating intractable and incurable chronic pain who rely on these medications in order to take a shower, to make the child breakfast or lunch or dinner, to not think about suicide as a way to stop their pain. There are many many many diseases that are not cancerous which means we have a long life span. I’m only 51 years old. Do you want me and my fellow sufferers to live 20 30 or 40 more years without any release from the pain that doesn’t let us sleep takes away our appetite even and makes us home bound and alone. I don’t expect people without this type of pain to even understand what I’m trying to communicate. I guess I would say that an abscessed tooth is extremely painful. Many people have had abscessed teeth so they understand that pain. Well I would love to have an abscess tooth and not have RSD. It would be like a day at the spa. I gave birth naturally to a 8 pound to ounce baby boy was not an epidural or drop of pain medication. But RSD has brought me to my knees and I can handle pain. But this type of pain I’m not sure how long a normal person could bear it. I’ve been suffering from RSD for almost 6 years. The future does not look very promising. After the DEA crackdown on pain medication its become very very difficult for legitimate chronic pain patients to obtain a legitimate prescription from a pharmacy. The government has fix the problem alright. People that should be getting these drugs can’t get them and the people who shouldn’t be getting opiate medications have already turned to heroin. All the anti opiate Lobby has done is Dr the abusers to heroin and leave the sufferers to suffer unbearable pain until they cannot take it anymore. I wonder how many people will have to die by their own hand until the government wakes up to see oops we made a mistake!!!! My RSD was caused by a medical procedure that was not done correctly. And now Dr don’t want to help treat the pain that a doctor caused me. I want my life back but that’s not going to happen. But at least I should be able to get proper treatment instead of under treatment of my pain.