This week’s resolutions by the AMA’s ruling body went a step further, calling for an end to the “inappropriate use” of the CDC guideline to set dosing limits and blacklist physicians who exceed them.

RESOLVED that our AMA support balanced opioid sparing policies that are not based on hard thresholds, but on patient individuality, and help ensure safe prescribing practices, minimize workflow disruptions, and ensure patients have access to their medications in a timely manner, without additional, cumbersome documentation requirements.

RESOLVED that our AMA oppose the use of “high prescriber” lists used by national pharmacy chains, pharmacy benefit manager companies or health insurance companies when those lists do not provide due process and are used to blacklist physicians from writing prescriptions for controlled substances and preventing patients from having their prescriptions filled at their pharmacy of choice.

RESOLVED that our AMA incorporate into their advocacy that clinical practice guidelines specific to cancer treatment, palliative care, and end-of-life be utilized in lieu of CDC’s Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain as per CDC’s clarifying recommendation.

The CDC’s so-called clarification came in a commentary published April 24 in The New England Journal of Medicine. Three authors of the guideline did not take any responsibility for the poor implementation of their recommendations, but acknowledged that “some policies and practices purportedly derived from the guideline have in fact been inconsistent with, and often go beyond, its recommendations.”

Nearly two months later, not a single word of the CDC guideline has been clarified or changed, and insurers, pharmacies and many states continue to enforce its voluntary recommendations as mandatory policy.

Doctors who prescribe high doses of controlled substances are also being blacklisted by the DEA and state medical boards, which routinely use prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) to identify and target physicians who are considered “high prescribers.”

Federal prosecutors have also sent letters to hundreds of physicians warning them that their opioid prescribing practices could subject them to criminal prosecution — often without any evidence that their patients were harmed by the drugs.