By Pat Anson, Editor

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is going ahead with plans to reduce the supply of many opioid painkillers by 20 percent next year. That’s in addition to steep cuts in opioid production quotas the agency imposed in 2017.

In a notice quietly published this week in the Federal Register, the DEA said it would reduce the supply of many commonly prescribed Schedule II opioid painkillers, including oxycodone, hydrocodone, oxymorphone, hydromorphone, morphine, codeine, and fentanyl. The agency said demand for the medications had dropped.

In proceeding with the cuts, which were first proposed in August, the DEA dismissed warnings from three drug makers that the reduced supplies of opioids “were insufficient to provide for the estimated medical, scientific, research and industrial needs of the United States.”

The DEA received over 100 public comments on its proposal, most of them expressing concern that any further reduction in opioids would adversely impact the availability of prescription painkillers.

“I am 75 years old, have metastatic prostate cancer in my bones and have to take high doses of fentanyl patches and morphine tablets for the chronic, intractable pain. Please do not further reduce the supply of my critical medicine,” wrote Bill Daniel.

“Please stop this misguided attempt to save people from themselves. If demand is down, it's because you bullied physicians into prescribing less, not from a genuine market conditions,” wrote one anonymous poster.

“You want to cut my access to the medication I'm legally prescribed by my pain management doctors! Would you consider the same for people deemed disabled due to other illnesses? You are going to cause millions of us to either commit suicide due to unbearable pain or turn to street drugs,” said Christa Rood.

The DEA said comments such as these dealt with medical issues that were “outside of the scope” of its order and did not offer any new data for the agency to consider.

Under federal law, the DEA sets production quotas for all manufacturers of opioid medication and other controlled substances. This year the agency reduced the amount of almost every Schedule II opioid medication by 25 percent or more. The 2017 quota for hydrocodone, which is sold under brand names like Vicodin, Lortab and Lorcet, was reduced by a third.

Those cuts were not sufficient to stop the opioid epidemic, according to two letters sent to the DEA by a group of U.S. senators. The first letter, sent in July, urged that "further reductions... are necessary to rein in this epidemic.”

A second letter, sent in September, said there was "no adequate justification for the volume of opioids approved for the market." The senators asked to DEA to make the 2018 cuts in the opioid supply at least as deep as they were in 2017. 

Opioid prescriptions have actually been in decline for several years.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid prescribing in the U.S. has fallen by 18 percent since 2010.  

In recent years, heroin and illicit fentanyl have emerged as the driving forces behind the overdose crisis, which killed an estimated 64,000 Americans in 2016. Despite that, federal efforts to prevent overdose deaths remain largely focused on reducing the use of prescription painkillers.

The CDC, for example, is spending $4.2 million on an Rx Awareness campaign in four states; running ads on billboards, radio, newspapers and online that warn about the risks of prescription painkillers. Although a recent CDC study found fentanyl was involved in over half the overdoses in ten states, the agency says it has no plans to include fentanyl or heroin in its awareness campaign.

“Our aim with this campaign is to prevent prescription opioid overdose deaths, since prescription opioids continue to be involved in more overdose deaths than any other drug. Based on studies of people entering treatment, the majority of people with opioid use disorder (including heroin use disorder) still start with prescription opioids,” CDC spokesperson Courtney Lenard said in an email.