A key part of the federal government’s narrative about the epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths in the U.S. has been that it is driven by doctors and other clinicians overprescribing opioid painkillers. That story line is false — and was never true.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has traditionally relied on death certificate data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics for its data on overdose deaths, organized as Underlying Cause of Death data using codes from the International Classification of Diseases.
In 2018, however, the CDC and the U.S. Bureau of Vital Statistics were forced to admit that they had been misattributing deaths involving illegal street fentanyl to deaths caused by “prescription” drugs. When this error was corrected, the number of deaths in which a prescription drug was reported dropped by half.
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As a health care writer and advocate for people in pain, I communicate with patients and clinicians every week. What I see is that pain medicine in the U.S. is failing both patients and clinicians, largely due to the CDC’s faulty narrative and the DEA’s harassment and prosecution of clinicians for legally and ethically prescribing opioid painkillers to their patients. The result? Millions of Americans living with severe chronic pain are being denied safe and effective pain management with prescription opioids, deserted by doctors afraid of being targeted and persecuted by DEA and state medical boards.
