Evidence for the view that this law was at least in part aimed at the upcoming midterm election: As of September 19, political ads mentioning opioids had run more than 50,000 times in races for Congress and governor in 25 states. In 2014, by comparison, there’d been just one opioids political ad, in Kentucky, which aired 70 times, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.
The law “is everything but the kitchen sink,” Daniel Ciccarone, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, is quoted as saying in a Washington Poststory on October 24 “Anyone who has any thought about how to address the opioid crisis got a bill in there.”
“I do think it’s woefully underfunded,” said Chinazo Cunningham, M.D., M.S., a professor of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center, in that same Poststory. “It feels to me as though it’s not really a coordinated effort, that it’s bits and pieces—honestly, a little bit working on the edges.”
Further evidence of how politics collides head-on with reality in opioid legislation: former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie bragged in his 2018 farewell address in January that his early 2017 opioid law limiting prescriptions to five days had cut opioid prescriptions by 15% there. Meanwhile, as of October, New Jersey is one of only two states in which opioid deaths will soar more than 15% in 2018 over 2017, according to the provisional CDC data cited above. That projection is based on actual numbers plus a factor for late reporting of deaths for which the cause takes time to determine.
In all, Congress appropriated $8.5 billion for the 2019 fiscal year for opioid programs, but this law doesn’t guarantee any funding for future years.
Again, there’s a detailed roundup of the content of this law affecting orthopedics in our prior news report cited in the lead paragraph above.
