By Richard “Red” Lawhern, Guest Columnist

Dear Dr. Robert Redfield and Dr. Debra Houry,

By its passive refusal to conduct a thorough review of the impact and outcomes of its 2016 opioid prescribing guideline, the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control is actively causing harm to hundreds of thousands of pain patients.

Deserted by their doctors in a hostile regulatory environment, many are going into the streets seeking pain relief. Possibly hundreds may already be dead of illegal fentanyl poisoning or suicide. Military veterans, in particular, face draconian restrictions on the availability of safe and effective opioid medication therapy.

And all for no good reason!



I suggest with every intention of professional and personal courtesy, that government organizations can no longer stand aside from this centrally important issue. Such a stance will make you and other federal agencies accessories to state-sanctioned torture and negligent homicide. That is unacceptable.

As a former military officer, I respect a well-tried motto that I urge each of our regulators to take on as their own:

Lead, follow, or get out of the way!

It has become clear that the CDC guideline must be immediately withdrawn for a major rewrite. In its present form, the guideline is unjustifiably biased against opioid pain relievers, factually incomplete, in error on basic science, and founded on untested assumptions that do not hold up under any degree of careful scrutiny.

The guideline is directly responsible for a vast regulatory over-reach by DEA and state authorities that is driving doctors out of pain management and denying safe and effective pain treatment for hundreds of thousands of patients.