Congress Needs An Opioid Intervention

In an effortto combat the opioid crisis in America, Congress is calling for a slate of governmental interventions that have been tried, tested, and shown to cause more harm.

- J.J. Rich

In June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed 50 bills, with more to come, that throw billions of dollars at already rich universities, hand responsibility for determining addiction treatment procedures to the federal government, and allow the U.S. attorney general to ban vaguely defined substances, among many other clumsy actions. Too much of the new legislation is grounded in the “overprescription” hypothesis, which blames the current unprecedented rates of overdose on an expansion in the number of opioid prescriptions that began in the 1990s. The consensus around this theory has prompted Congress to further restrict opioid prescription access.

In responding this way, Congress is ignoring decades of its own data and a lesson Americans should have learned long ago: When government restricts access to something people want, it drives demand to the black market. In this case, as opioids have become increasingly difficult to obtain legally in the last decade, users have switched to “diverted” prescription medications and illicit alternatives, including heroin. And just as Prohibition pushed bootleggers to switch from beer to potent bathtub gin, traffickers are increasingly adulterating their narcotics with potent synthetic opioids such as sufentanil—a substance that can be up to 500 times stronger than morphine.

THANKS TO PRESCRIPTION drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), state-level limits on the number of pills a patient can receive, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) orders to reduce opioid manufacturing, prescription rates are now at their lowest level since 2006. Yet the overdose death toll over the last eight years is at a historic high.