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Home Politics & Law

DEA Sets CDC Opioid Guidelines

The CDC unveiled its latest opioid prescribing guidelines.

Daily Remedy by Daily Remedy
November 14, 2022
in Politics & Law
5
DEA Sets CDC Opioid Guidelines

Creative Commons

Let’s talk about the CDC and the DEA. Let’s talk about the newly minted 2022 CDC opioid prescribing guidelines and implementing those guidelines in the court of law.

Let’s start from the beginning. During the early 2010s, what most people characterize as the start of the opioid epidemic, we placed considerable emphasis on urine drug screens, and doses and quantities prescribed for opioids. In 2016, the CDC offered recommendations to help physicians navigate this increasingly complex, half-medical, half-legal world of opioids. They organized and codified newly minted guidelines through which providers were expected to manage patients. They standardized care, but shifted the provider’s perceptions away from direct communication, and toward the guidelines themselves.

As providers grew to rely on the guidelines to verify the need for opioids, they made decisions based on them.

If a urine drug screen came back positive for the prescribed opioids, then they would prescribe opioids. If negative, then they would abruptly stop. If a patient had a high dose of opioids, then they would be lowered to a recommended dose based on the guidelines. If the patient refused to lower her medications, then she would be dismissed by the provider.

Snap decisions based on the simplest interpretation of the guidelines limited all of patient care into an interpretation of the guidelines. But it was the safest decision for many providers, since it was the interpretation upheld in court. Sure, the CDC said back in 2016, and has continued to reiterate up to the present, including in the 2022 guidelines, that they are recommendations only – not hardened rules to adhere to. But the CDC isn’t implementing the guidelines in the court of law. That would be the DEA. And the rule of law has a funny way of setting the tone for the practice of clinical medicine.

George Washington said, “many ideas become false when taken to extremes”. The DEA’s simplistic interpretation of the CDC guidelines has led to an extreme approach to opioid prohibition. Countless physicians have faced criminal charges or DEA sanctions based on nothing more than an interpretation of a non-clinically trained DEA agent, who ascribes culpability by scrutinizing a provider’s clinical actions and decisions. Inevitably, this pits the provider against the CDC guidelines, with the DEA agent’s interpretation of the guideline holding the scales of moralized justice.

The opioid prescribing guidelines don’t address these differing perspectives. They won’t stop a drug-seeking addict from posing as a patient to secure prescription opioids, no matter how hard they try to scare providers. If the guidelines call for a restriction on the number of opioids prescribed, then an addict will simply visit the provider more often. If the guidelines call for urine drug screens, then an addict will find a way to pass the test. Restricting specific behavior in healthcare doesn’t stop the behavior, it simply makes that behavior harder to do – but it will get done, despite the increased risk.

We forget that. We think making something harder will stop it. It’s not true for other conditions like abortion or teen smoking, yet we doggedly insist on curtailing opioid prescribing through a maze of guidelines. Inevitably the guidelines fail in their intended purpose of reducing opioid abuse and overdose-related deaths. So we revise the guidelines. We add caveats. And then we revise them some more.

Instead of focusing on the guidelines, we should focus on the patient encounter. It’s where we find the perceptions that form between provider and patient. It’s in these critical moments that a patient with chronic pain receives a prescription for opioids.

It’s the heart of healthcare and is unlike any other setting found in society. Patients discuss the most vulnerable and intimate aspects of their lives, while providers analyze what they hear as they extract from their mental database of clinical knowledge. It’s a process that forms the patient narrative.

Though we never think of patient encounters as stories, our perceptions of healthcare are both conveyed and understood as narratives. This is what the guidelines miss. A single rule or a set of recommendations doesn’t capture the experience of implementing them in an encounter or having them implemented in your care. The real story of healthcare is the perceptions that form through that experience.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous quip, “the medium is the message”, conveys the notion that the context of a story – where and how it was said – is more important than the actual words spoken. Similarly, how the guidelines are implemented is far more important than the guidelines themselves, regardless of how many times we revise them.

This makes the DEA far more important than the CDC. The DEA is implementing the guidelines in the court of law, and their interpretation effectively defines the implementation of guidelines among providers and patients.

So when providers refer to the opioid guidelines when deciding whether to prescribe opioids, they aren’t parsing through the nuances underlying the context of the guidelines. They’re making the simplest, legally safest decision, using the guidelines merely to justify that course of action. This comes as the expense of good patient care. Look no further than the many chronic pain patients succumbing to suicide or suffering through intractable pain after their provider terminates their clinical relationship.

By reducing the complexity of medicine into simplified guidelines that serve as legal rubrics, the DEA has a framework to exact punitive measures against providers who veer away from their interpretations of what constitutes good care for chronic pain patients.

This is the elephant in the room, the thing that’s never mentioned when discussing the CDC guidelines. We applaud the revised guidelines for acknowledging uncertainty in patient care. We agree that individualized decisions must be made based on the unique needs of each patient.

That’s not the problem. The problem is that the DEA blatantly ignores this. That’s what’s missing in all the discussions about the revised guidelines.

It’s time we talk about it.

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Daily Remedy

Dr. Jay K Joshi serves as the editor-in-chief of Daily Remedy. He is a serial entrepreneur and sought after thought-leader for matters related to healthcare innovation and medical jurisprudence. He has published articles on a variety of healthcare topics in both peer-reviewed journals and trade publications. His legal writings include amicus curiae briefs prepared for prominent federal healthcare cases.

Comments 5

  1. Sara Batchelder says:
    3 years ago

    Don’t forget the role played by DoJ! I heard a few of them interviewed during the Trump administration, and they simply know NOTHING about pain care and addiction, so they are prosecuting the wrong people for the wrong reason. These folks are still prosecuting the War on Drugs at 100 MPH. Even if DEA agents overstep, DoJ could still choose to not prosecute. But they choose to anyway. Even the divided Supreme Court (which is not very credible anymore) agreed 9-0 that DoJ was overstepping. Neither DEA nor DoJ have American doctors practicing medicine in their mandates. Period. Yes, if a doctor is a true pill mill, investigate. Yes, if a doctor is trading sex for medicine, investigate. If a doctor is prescribing a lot of meds for patients? 1,000% that falls into the state’s medical board to investigate. End of story. DEA and DoJ need to get back to investigating Mexican, American and Chinese drug cartels – they are the folks truly killing and harming people.

    Reply
  2. Thomas Michael Bertsch says:
    3 years ago

    Also, if your drug screen came back for any “illicit” drug, your medical care will be terminated. Chronic Pain Patients are the ONLY patients who have to take a drug test to get their medications. Federal law states that you cannot deny anyone who is currently using an illicit drug, medical care. What about car accident victims? Are they drug tested before the Doctor helps them? Maybe we can go door to door, and drug test EVERYONE. ….

    Reply
  3. Sheri R McMahon says:
    3 years ago

    I have a family member with chronic pain. He downsizes his own opiates when he is able to (he really dislikes the effect of opiates on his mental status, and he has a second chronic disease that causes fatigue and cognitive fog as well) but at other times he has had terrible flares of pain lasting weeks. When his pain started he was going to a resident clinic and a pain clinic, but in his healthcare system, the pain clinic is only non-opioid, and the residents were limited in what they could prescribe. The learning curve (and eventually getting a regular PCP instead of a resident PCP) was very, very hard. One night he went to ER after UC doctor refused to provide pain relief when a 5 day Rx had run out and he couldn’t get an appt at the resident clinic for 2 weeks. UC doctor said he could lose his license. (PDMP pharmacist I contacted later said the UC should not have said what he said, fwiw). I found the PDMP site which had a bunch of reference stuff, including a DEA article which basically portrayed anyone with a chronic condition who has acquired knowledge of their own diagnosis and medications used to treat it as a likely substance abuser–since having that knowledge is one of the “signs”.

    Reply
  4. steve ariens says:
    2 years ago

    The SCOTUS in June 2022 rulings told the EPA & ATF that they did not have the statutory authority to create new interpretations or regulations of the laws they were in charge of enforcing, only Congress has that authority. I wonder why no one has challenged all of the interpretations and regulations that the DEA has created with regards to the CSA. I was around when Pres Nixon signed the CSA bill into law and while the law both the prescriber & Pharmacist has a “corresponding responsibility” that controlled substances are provided to a person with a valid medical necessity for the specific medication(s). Back in 1970 the MME system did not exist, back then… there was no “red flags”. We depended on FDA professional prescribing literature to ascertain if prescribed doses of controlled substances for a particular purpose was appropriate. The CSA actually created the BNDD ( Bureau of Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs) to oversee the enforcement of the CSA and Congress created and turned that authority over to the DEA in 1973. Over the last 50 yrs I wonder just how many new interpretations and regulations that the DEA has created – without statutory authority – from the CSA ?

    Reply
    • Ted W Cole says:
      2 years ago

      Right on Steve!!!
      If the DEA can’t win the war on drugs, start picking on the doctors and patients
      that don’t shoot back!
      The COWARDS
      Ted

      Reply

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Videos

Summary

In this episode of the Daily Remedy Podcast, Dr. Joshi discusses the rapidly changing landscape of healthcare laws and trends, emphasizing the importance of understanding the distinction between statutory and case law. The conversation highlights the role of case law in shaping healthcare practices and encourages physicians to engage in legal advocacy by writing legal briefs to influence case law outcomes. The episode underscores the need for physicians to actively participate in the legal processes that govern their practice.

Takeaways

Healthcare trends are rapidly changing and confusing.
Understanding statutory and case law is crucial for physicians.
Case law can overturn existing statutory laws.
Physicians can influence healthcare law through legal briefs.
Writing legal briefs doesn't require extensive legal knowledge.
Narrative formats can be effective in legal briefs.
Physicians should express their perspectives in legal matters.
Engagement in legal advocacy is essential for physicians.
The interpretation of case law affects medical practice.
Physicians need to be part of the legal conversation.
Physicians: Write thy amicus briefs!
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