opioids
When Coverage Gets Cut, Overdoses Increase
Image by Dee from Pixabay This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on American Council on Science and Health on February 9, 2025. When health insurance becomes conditional and unaffordable, it doesn’t just disappear from balance sheets—it vanishes from people’s lives at the moment they need it most. The expiration of enhanced ACA Marketplace subsidies…
Read MoreLong-Term Pain Therapy With Opioids
JAMA Letter by Dr. Lynn Webster This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared online in JAMA on December 18, 2025. Long-Term Pain Therapy With Opioids To the Editor The Viewpoint by Drs. Bicket and Bateman highlights the asymmetry between abundant data on opioid-related harms and the scarcity of evidence regarding benefits of long-term opioid…
Read MoreLegislative and Research Efforts to Reduce Opioid Exposure: Progress, Challenges, and Emerging Threats
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared in Pain Medicine News on October 15, 2025. The United States continues to face an opioid crisis marked by persistently high rates of opioid use disorder (OUD) and overdose deaths. In 2023, 8.6 million adults misused prescription analgesics. Prescription opioids can cause harm, and the risks…
Read MoreContinued Blaming of Purdue Pharma Won’t Solve the Opioid Crisis
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on Pain News Network on July 23, 2025 On July 15, The Washington Post published an editorial urging states to use opioid settlement funds to expand naloxone access and addiction treatment programs. These are sound public health goals. But the editorial’s framing — tying these investments…
Read MoreCDC Revised Opioid Prescribing Guideline Falls Short of What People in Pain Need
The updated guideline contains beneficial changes. Among them, certain prescription duration limits and the upper MME dosage threshold have been removed. There is some acknowledgment that pain treatment is indeed important. Yet, the inappropriate usage of the 2016 guideline and policies created in its image to harass, prosecute and even jail clinicians must be specifically and adequately addressed. The MME threshold now in the revised version is no more scientifically sound than the ones in the previous version, and it has already been shown that dosage levels are too easily interpreted with rigidity by policymakers and payors. Until these issues are resolved, the fallout has the potential to harm patient care into the future.
Read MoreCrime of the Century: Addiction Is Not That Simple
Crime of the Century had the opportunity to debunk myths about addiction. Instead, it confuses the terms addiction and physical dependence and propagates misinformation.
Read MoreTrading One Crisis for Another Is No Answer to the Opioid Epidemic
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune on May 20, 2021. Many years ago, I took on an unforgettable patient (“Jack”) who was on a high dose of physician-prescribed opioids. He wanted me to continue his high dosage. But I was unsure whether the benefit of doing…
Read MoreWhat HBO’s “Crime of the Century” Doesn’t Tell You
The use of opioids was not a crime then, nor is it today. However, the failure to appropriately treat chronic pain when it is possible to do so should be a criminal offense.
Read MoreConsequences of the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain
In my view, it was a mistake for the CDC to publish the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain in 2016.
Read MoreA Drug Problem Isn’t a Moral Failing
We may never know why Rush Limbaugh made the choices he did. But, just as we would never think of berating him for falling victim to the lung cancer that took his life, we also shouldn’t chastise him for misusing painkillers.
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