Supreme Court Weighs Discretion of Doctors to Prescribe Opioids for Pain

The court’s decision could have significant implications for the latitude doctors can take in prescribing potentially addictive painkillers and other restricted medications.

Mar 2, 2022 - 08:00

0 3

Supreme Court Weighs Discretion of Doctors to Prescribe Opioids for Pain

Lawyers for two former doctors serving upwards of 20 years each for illegally prescribing opioids and running pill mill clinics that dispensed the highly addictive painkillers for common ailments like neck aches and back pain with little oversight and often without even seeing the patients before prescribing them, will argue before the Supreme Court that the criminal standard the physicians faced is applied inconsistently among the federal circuits.

They are asking that the doctors’ convictions be overturned, and the court establish a uniform standard that permits doctors to raise a “good faith” defense, reports The New York Times.

The court’s decision on the broader legal questions could have significant implications for the latitude doctors can take in prescribing potentially addictive painkillers and other restricted medications. Prosecutors, through the office of the U.S. Solicitor General, argue that the criminal standard in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which permits doctors and pharmacists to dispense certain drugs such as opioids and amphetamines, categorized by their potential for abuse and medical value, even as it prohibits everyone else from doing so, is straightforward and well-established, with a baked-in good-faith defense that affords doctors ample leeway.

In a brief asking for a clear legal standard, health-law and policy professors argue that several appeals courts permit doctors to be convicted if they deviate from accepted medical practice, without a jury also having to find that the doctor did so “without a legitimate medical purpose,” a standard that they say lacks the critical component of intent.

That element, the professors wrote, distinguishes well-meaning, possibly negligent doctors from criminal ones, and without it, the Controlled Substances Act “has been weaponized against practitioners in reaction to the overdose crisis.”