Dive Brief:
- Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb reaffirmed in a statement Monday the agency's commitment to finding the "right balance" between reducing the U.S. rate of opioid addiction and providing access to legitimate patients, for whom these medications can be lifesaving.
- He had strong words for practitioners regarding their role in helping spur the opioid epidemic. "The roots of this crisis are embedded in the practice of medicine, and prescribing practices that were at times too cavalier," Gottlieb said.
- The agency touched on its opioid addiction-fighting initiatives without introducing a concrete plan for new action, although Gottlieb called for a "number of new steps" to combat a national crisis the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling "more deadly than the AIDS epidemic."
Dive Insight:
The FDA has recognized it also has a part to play in combating the opioid crisis, citing its revised blueprint for drug manufacturer training to be finalized later this year and its innovation challenge to foster development of novel, pain-treating medical devices. At the same time, payers like Aetna, Anthem and Cigna are making their own efforts to combat overprescribing.
Gottlieb also said the FDA will work to encourage medical professional societies to develop evidence-based guidelines on correct opioid prescribing practices to reduce careless or superfluous dispensing. "Unfortunately," Gottlieb writes, "the fact remains that there are still too many prescriptions being written for opioids."
However, overprescribing is just one element of the challenge. Opioid prescribing is dropping, at least according to one survey.
The American Medical Association's Opioid Task Force 2018 Progress Report found that American physicians are prescribing fewer opioids and more naloxone, a medication used to block the effects of opioids, as well as increasing prescription drug monitoring program use.
Opioid prescription, AMA reported, decreased by 22% between 2013 and 2017, and PDMP use increased 121% between 2016 and 2017 alone.
AMA called for policymakers and regulators to increase oversight, with which the FDA is clearly on board.
However, although opioid prescriptions have dropped, addiction and overdose have continued to rise due to the prevalence of and easy access to illegal, cheap opioids such as heroin or illicitly made fentanyl, heroin's synthetic, and much more potent, analog.
And despite limited progress, costs in dollars and deaths are still rising.
Opioid addiction and overdose treatment costs in large employer-based health plans increased by a factor of nine between 2004 and 2016, even though opioid prescriptions have fallen since their peak in 2009.
The rate of drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids such as fentanyl doubled between 2015 and 2016. In 2016 alone, there were more than 63,600 drug overdose deaths in the U.S.
Experts agree that a multifaceted and comprehensive approach is needed to slow the ongoing opioid epidemic. Bipartisan legislation is currently being workshopped in Congress, with measures ranging from restructuring grants to help states boost addiction treatment in hard-hit areas to boosting non-addictive medication research.
It's a "difficult challenge both for the FDA and for providers," Gottlieb acknowledged in the statement. "We don't want to act in ways that are poorly targeted."