Former Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir says former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb's support for a ban was based on "embarrassingly poor evidence."
Two recent studies show how ham-handed efforts to reduce opioid prescriptions undermine medical care.
The crackdown on pain medication made drug use more dangerous and did nothing to address the factors driving "deaths of despair."
The data do not support the conventional wisdom that pain pill prescriptions are driving drug-related fatalities.
An appeals court panel rules the Controlled Substance Act's "crackhouse" provision forbids Safehouse from creating the facility.
Psychiatrist Sally Satel on her eye-opening year at a clinic in Ironton, Ohio
The new administration nixes a change that would have allowed more physicians to prescribe buprenorphine.
Theresa Mathis was in the middle of a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence when she sent Reason a letter asking for help.
The original formulation of OxyContin didn’t create the opioid crisis, argues psychiatrist Sally Satel, and removing it from the market didn’t make the problem go away.
After a slight drop in 2018, fatalities involving opioids jumped last year, setting a new record that is apt to be broken this year.
The story of why pain relievers took root in Appalachia begins decades before the introduction of OxyContin.
The $8.3 billion DOJ settlement is part of a crackdown that has perversely pushed drug users toward more dangerous substitutes.
A brief supporting the company's appeal argues that its discussion of pain treatment was constitutionally protected.
As of March 2020, combined fatal and nonfatal drug overdoses were nearly 20 percent higher than through the same month in 2019.
A Florida prosecutor's office reviewed the cases and agreed to resentencing for nearly two dozen inmates, calling it "a matter of fundamental fairness."
But we can't ban our way out of the research chemical problem.
It's an interesting strategy for a president who ran in 2016 on a Nixonian "law and order" platform.
Blame angry neighbors, not the feds.
Federal judge confirms ruling that it doesn’t violate federal “crack house” law.
Government solutions to the opioid overdose crisis have contributed to the problem, and no candidate really wants to acknowledge it.
Since prescription restrictions pushed drug users toward deadlier substitutes, the decrease in fatalities is more plausibly attributed to harm reduction measures.
Despite notable progress in policies regarding pot and psychedelics, the war on drugs always finds new targets.
U.S. life expectancy peaked in 2014.
Somewhere between 650 and 1,000 Florida inmates are serving sentences under draconian opioid trafficking laws that have since been rolled back.
Sexually scarring children with unnecessary strip searches to prevent them from committing misdemeanors
Illicit fentanyl and heroin accounted for the vast majority of opioid-related deaths, while only 1 percent of cases involved drugs for which people had prescriptions.
Gutting Section 230 would make it harder to track drug deals, not easier.
Deaths continue to rise, thanks to increased use of less-safe black market pain pills.
The discussion during last night's debate grossly exaggerated the role of prescription pain pills in opioid-related deaths.
A safe place meant to help prevent overdose deaths is not the same as a crackhouse.
Federal drug prohibition played a big role in creating the opioid crisis. Unfortunately, the government is also slowing the spread of one possible solution to it.
Bad science and panics by those who want to escalate the opioid drug war.
Policies aimed at curtailing the harms caused by substance abuse may instead magnify those harms.
A RAND report highlights the importance of new synthesis methods, cheap international shipping, and online distribution aided by privacy-protecting technologies.
Blaming opioid makers for the "opioid crisis" may be emotionally satisfying, but the reality is more complicated.
Can legal sales of prescription opioids constitute a nuisance? Two decisions, based on nearly identical statutes, reach diametrically opposed conclusions.
Nonmedical use of prescription analgesics did not become more common, but it did become more dangerous.
The data reinforce the point that there is no straightforward relationship between pain pill consumption and overdoses.
Irrational fear of incidental contact with opioids can lead to criminal charges that make overdose bystanders less likely to call 911.
The causes of opioid-related deaths are more complicated than "too many pain pills."
The FDA Opioid Labeling Accuracy Act would aggravate the widespread problem of involuntary dose reductions and patient abandonment.
The decision by the New Hampshire Board of Medicine suggests state officials are beginning to recognize the harm caused by the crackdown on pain pills.
Such scaremongering poses a potentially deadly threat.
Lawmakers struggle to pass a bill protecting operators from arrest and prosecution.
"All we want to do is save some young people from dying needlessly," says former Gov. Ed Rendell, who's on the board of Safehouse, the nation's first supervised injection site to operate out in the open.
