Lessons from the Opioid Database

By Roger Chriss, PNN Columnist

Last month The Washington Post made public for the first time a DEA database of opioid prescribing that shows “the path of every single pain pill” sold in the United States from 2006 to 2012.

The Post’s analysis showed that 76 billion pills flowed through the country and nearly 100,000 fatal overdoses occurred over a seven-year period.

Biospace explained that opioid manufacturers, distributors and retailers “allowed the drugs to reach the streets of communities large and small, despite persistent red flags that those pills were being sold in apparent violation of federal law and diverted to the black market.”

The first lesson from the database seems obvious. Too many pills were prescribed, with opioid manufacturers, distributors and retailers failing to report suspicious orders and government agencies failing to oversee the prescription opioid supply.

“If you don’t start millions of opioid-naive people on opioids they don’t need, it translates … in the longer term into fewer overdoses,” Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys told the Post.

But this misses a key lesson. Although no drug should ever be used when it is not needed, this leaves open the obvious and essential question: How do we reduce risks in people who do need opioids?

We cannot ban opioids completely without returning to pre-Civil War medicine. But each year we have millions of car crashes, severe battlefield and workplace injuries, new cases of cancer, major surgeries and devastating long-term illness.

In the many commentaries on the opioid database, little has been said about improving prescribing safety. We need better ways to use opioids safely because sometimes we just don’t have any other option.

If it is true, as Julie Croft, an Oklahoma addiction treatment provider wrote, “We are all just one accident away from becoming addicted to painkillers” -- then we had better rapidly improve how we use opioids or come up with better alternatives since we have millions of accidents annually.

To this end, Yale and the Mayo Clinic were recently awarded a $5.3 million FDA grant to study patients with acute pain and their use of opioids.

Reduced Prescribing May Not Be Enough

The next lesson in the database is vulnerability to substance abuse. Dennis Scanlon, PhD, and Christopher S. Hollenbeak, PhD, note in the American Journal of Managed Care, that “although using government or regulatory mechanisms to prevent or significantly curb the supply of addictive narcotics is certainly valuable, there is also value in preventing or reducing addiction at its core.”

In other words, policies that reduce opioid prescribing may be helpful, but they may also not be enough. We need better tools and greater understanding of opioid prescribing. The National Institute of Drug Abuse currently estimates that 8% of people on long-term opioid therapy develop some form of opioid use disorder, while The BMJ estimates that less than 1% of surgical patients receiving opioids face a similar fate. These numbers may seem low, but every effort should be made to reduce them.

As bioethicist Travis Reider states in his book “In Pain” about his personal struggle with opioids: “The bottom line is that we are not, by and large, acting decisively in an evidence-based way to tackle the myriad problems raised by opioids. Although we don’t know everything about how to turn the corner on this crisis, we know a lot, and we’re simply not doing it.”

The last essential lesson from the opioid database is that opioid abuse and addiction came long before the crisis. The clichéd response that we “cannot arrest our way” out of the crisis needs to be extended to we “cannot simply restrict our way out” either. We need better prevention and early intervention for opioid use disorder, and improved management of the opioid supply chain so as to prevent theft and diversion.

The crisis is a fast-moving target, with prescription opioid levels having dropped significantly since 2012. Overdoses involving prescription opioids have also fallen, while deaths linked to illicit opioids like fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine are rising sharply. We will need far more than a prescribing database to guide policy moving forward.

Roger Chriss lives with Ehlers Danlos syndrome and is a proud member of the Ehlers-Danlos Society. Roger is a technical consultant in Washington state, where he specializes in mathematics and research.

The information in this column should not be considered as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It is for informational purposes only and represents the author’s opinions alone. It does not inherently express or reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of Pain News Network.