AMA Journal of Ethics

Opioid use research has focused mainly on treatment and overdose responses. Clinically and ethically, these priorities should change.

Six recommendations focus on specific actions to help reverse the nation’s opioid epidemic.

Responding to opioid use disorder as a US public health crisis requires all clinicians to recognize addiction as a treatable disease.

This third era of opioids ruining thousands of US lives follows a first era of iatrogenic addiction stemming from the Harrison Act of 1914, and a second was marked by changes in pain treatment attitudes between 1950 and 1970.

Key policy changes would better situate clinicians to prescribe care in ways that are ethical, safe, and effective.

Driven by toxic, unpredictable, unregulated supply, drug overdose deaths are rampant. Policies that support the war on drugs have to change to be helpful.

Pharma has long marketed opioids in ways that contribute to opioid use disorder and deaths by overdose. Regulatory mistakes in approving and labeling new analgesics by the FDA didn’t make us safer.

Do the WHO and health professionals simply fail to do their job adequately?

Debate continues on how to frame tobacco and nicotine product regulation from a children’s rights perspective.

In this cartoon, a guilt-ridden, heavily scarred surgeon prepares to atone for his team’s failed attempts to save an innocent child victim of a mass shooting.