Gun control advocates like to accuse legislators of being “afraid of the NRA,” implying that reason and principle have nothing to do with their legislative decisions. In the same way, Jackie Kucinich, in a column in The Daily Beast, suggests that the failure of Congress to pass CARA 2.0 (Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act) is due primarily to the lobbying clout of the American Medical Association, pointing to its status as the “seventh highest lobbying spender in 2017.” 

The article quotes opioid reform advocate Gary Mendell as saying “the AMA will resist anything that regulates healthcare”—an interesting opinion about an organization that supported passage of the Affordable Care Act, one of the deepest regulatory intrusions into American health care in half a century. Over the years, the AMA’s seeming reluctance to mount a principled defense of patient autonomy and freedom of choice in healthcare—perhaps fearing it may jeopardize the cartel it lobbied so hard to establish over the past century and a half—has led to an exodus of many disillusioned members. It is estimated that less than 17 percent of the country’s doctors belong to the special interest group today.

But on this one, the AMA gets it right. It opposes the “one-size-fits-all” imposition of the 2016 opioid prescribing guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; guidelines that many noted addiction medicine specialists have criticized as not-evidence based. The AMA maintains the CDC expressly meant for its guidelines to be suggestive “rather than prescriptive.” Other scholars have pointed out that the CDC’s suggestions were based upon “Type 4 evidence,” defined as evidence in which “one has very little confidence in the effect estimate, and the true effect is likely to be substantially different from the estimate of the effect.” The AMA emphasizes the guideline’s statement, “Clinical decision making should be based on a relationship between the clinician and patient, and an understanding of the patient’s clinical situation, functioning and life context.”

When health care providers read and interpret these guidelines, they understand them to be informational, nonbinding, and inconclusive. But that’s not how politicians “do science.”

There is no evidence that prescription limits reduce overdose deaths. In fact, as the prescription rate has dropped dramatically since its peak in 2010, overdose rates are in turn rising. 

Kucinich seems to agree with the politicians who interpret the CDC guidelines as implying that a more than 3‑day supply of prescription opioids is a major force behind addiction. But that is not a precise and critical reading of the guidelines. In fact, as Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse pointed out in a 2016 New England Journal of Medicine article, “Addiction occurs in only a small percentage of persons who are exposed to opioids — even among those with preexisting vulnerabilities.” Cochrane systematic studies in 2010 and 2012 show a roughly 1 percent incidence of addiction in chronic non-cancer pain patients, and a January 2018 study of 568,000 “opioid naïve” patients given prescriptions for acute post-surgical pain found a “total misuse” rate of 0.6 percent. 

The AMA is actually a little late to the party. Numerous other specialists in the management of pain and addiction have criticized for months the tendency of politicians to codify the recommendations of the CDC. Even the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, has expressed concerns. Announcing plans to hold a public meeting on July 9 on “Patient-Focused Drug Development for Chronic Pain,” Dr. Gottlieb set forth “the goal of providing standards that could inform the development of evidence based guidelines.” 

The article quotes Sen. Joe Manchin (D‑WV) accusing his colleagues of being “too scared to take on the AMA.” My hope is that they may be finally responding to evidence and accounts from health care practitioners and patients who have spent months appealing to reason over dogma.