“It’s a very complex system, and our intent is to make sure that we encourage better prescribing so we can hopefully ensure that patients don’t turn to street drugs,” said Ralston King, senior director of government affairs with the Medical Society of Virginia, which helped to develop the new guidelines.

In 2015, deaths from illicit opioids such as fentanyl and heroin surpassed those caused by prescription opioids, but the new guidelines are meant to prevent patients from abusing prescriptions so they do not eventually turn to illicit alternatives.

“What’s really important about all this is that there are simply a lot of prescriptions written for opioids, not just in Virginia but across the country,” Brown said. “Last year, nationally, enough opioid prescriptions were written to give every adult in America a bottle of pills.”

The push for the Board of Medicine to adopt new regulations came from several sides, Brown said, including Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Secretary of Health and Human Resources Bill Hazel, who requested that the board consider the issue.

Virginia’s regulatory town hall website indicates the new regulations were put in place as a response to the public health emergency that Marissa Levine, the state’s commissioner of health, declared in November.