The War on Drugs Comes to the Doctor’s Office

Part of the Series

The Policing of Pain: Inside the Deadly War on Opioids

Ashley* lived with addiction and anxiety for years, but she was in recovery and making progress in 2017 after finding treatment at Jay Joshi’s clinic in northwestern Indiana. Joshi was known as a pioneer of telehealth visits for addiction patients that became widely used during the COVID pandemic, an expansion that lawmakers and the American Medical Association (AMA) are now pushing to make permanent. Joshi prescribed Ashley buprenorphine, a standard for treating opioid addiction and preventing overdose. Untreated mental health conditions can play a role in drug addiction that is often overlooked, so Joshi set Ashley up with a psychologist through a telehealth service. On November 21, 2017, Ashley was at Joshi’s office for a telehealth therapy appointment with her psychologist when Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents arrived with a search warrant.

At the time, Joshi was unaware that an undercover DEA agent had posed as a patient at his office to build a drug trafficking case against him. Agents took Joshi to a local police station for hours of questioning, where Joshi surrendered his DEA registration that allowed him to prescribe controlled substances — including buprenorphine. When he returned from the police station, Joshi said Ashley was deeply traumatized. Ashley told Joshi that she protested the interruption of her therapy appointment, so a DEA agent pulled out a gun and ordered her onto the ground.

In grand jury testimony, former employees-turned-witnesses described the young primary care physician’s practice as sloppy and his patients as “addicts,” a deeply harmful and stigmatizing term for patients in recovery. Joshi was accused of operating a “pill mill” in the local media, a claim Joshi says was manufactured by the DEA. Ashley and other patients were blacklisted by other local doctors, and without a buprenorphine prescription, Ashley relapsed and suffered fatal overdose. Stephanie, another patient who had stabilized and quit using heroin under Joshi’s care, also lost her prescription to buprenorphine. She soon died of an overdose after returning to heroin.

“Any patient who was associated with me or had my DEA registration number on their prescription history, other physicians didn’t want to see them,” Joshi said.

Opioid Prescribing Plummets as Overdose Deaths Rise

Since the early 2000s, rising rates of fatal drug overdoses breathed new life into the failing war on drugs. As they have during drug scares of the past, the government and mainstream media declared an “epidemic” of opioid addiction, and the crackdown on painkiller prescribing that followed injected the DEA — the federal law enforcement agency charged with waging the drug war — deep into the medical system. Opioid painkiller prescribing dropped sharply as a result, but the number of overdose deaths continued to rise before skyrocketing during the COVID pandemic.

To understand the crackdown, Truthout obtained multiple DEA search warrants and court records detailing law enforcement efforts to shut down pharmacies and clinics, and interviewed chronic pain patients and their advocates, doctors, researchers, pharmacists and people recovering from opioid addiction across the United States. Their advocacy and research are poking big holes in longstanding media narratives linking painkiller overprescribing of the past to rising rates of fatal drug overdose today. A close look at the policing of opioids reveals a common theme of the war on drugs: Policymakers and drug police are harming the same people they claim to help. Like the drug war, the painful side effects of the opioid crackdown disproportionately fall on lower-income people and people of color, whether they use opioids for any reason or simply seek treatment for chronic pain. The prescribing crackdown appears to be exacerbating existing inequities in access to health care and addiction treatment, one reason why rates of fatal overdose are rising fastest in Black communities.

“I have seen how, in these public health crises, the people we sort of want to help become stigmatized and end up losing access to care,” said Kate Nicholson, a former civil rights attorney for people with disabilities and pain patients who founded the National Pain Advocacy Center, in an interview. “The way in which we wage the drug war disproportionately against communities of color means that they are likely to face much greater barriers to health care.”

Over the past decade, drug police began plundering data from private medical records services and statewide prescription monitoring databases to digitally surveil doctors, patients and millions of prescriptions. Often using federal prescribing guidelines that became a national controversy as a reference, drug cops with no formal medical training search for “red flags” in prescribing records, such as how far a patient travels to receive treatment or the total volume of controlled substances prescribed by a provider. The investigations have led to raids on hundreds of clinics and pharmacies across the country. In some cases, doctors and pharmacists strike plea deals for reduced sentences. In other cases, respected physicians, pharmacists and addiction specialists are caught in the dragnet and forced to fight the DEA in court.

Doctors and pharmacists became increasingly wary of prescribing and dispensing opioids or even agreeing to treat patients prescribed opioids for chronically painful conditions in the first place. Others had their registrations to prescribe controlled substances revoked by the DEA pending rulings by the agency’s own administrative courts, or they closed their practices in fear of being raided and charged with drug trafficking.

In many cases, patients are left with nowhere to turn, especially if they are low-income and reside in areas with few medical providers to begin with. A 2019 study by the University of Michigan found that 40 percent of health care providers refused to see any new patients prescribed opioids. Along with prescribing guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2016 that were widely misapplied and led to misguided restrictions on opioid prescribing in dozens of states, the law enforcement crackdown left patients living with chronic pain without medications they rely on, forcing some toward illicit opioids, such as heroin and fentanyl, which vastly increase the risk of overdose. Others die by suicide.

A spokesperson for the DEA said the agency does not “interfere with or advise on the practice of medicine,” and providers who follow the law and practice within the “normal course of medicine” are not subject to enforcement. The CDC’s embattled opioid prescribing guidelines are “recommendations for practitioners, not regulation,” according to the DEA. However, advocates say the DEA and state medical boards have used controversial dosage caps included in the guidelines to accuse doctors of “overprescribing” without considering the specific medical needs of their patients.

“I hear from people every day who have been forced off their meds and have lost their ability to work and function and are suicidal,” Nicholson said. “People are not just being force-tapered [off medication] … they can’t even get health care anymore, just because they need a prescribed opioid to treat pain.”

Both the legal and illicit markets for prescription painkillers shrank as a result of the crackdown and regulatory moves by the DEA. Illicit drugs such as heroin and counterfeit pills containing potent synthetic opioids replaced prescription painkillers in the illicit market. Opioid prescribing rates have plummeted since 2012, but rates of fatal drug overdose increased for years before briefly leveling off in 2018 as policymakers worked to make treatment more accessible. Overdose deaths began rising again in 2019, and then the COVID pandemic hit, isolating patients and drug users from friends, family and health supports. From October 2019 to October 2020, the number of overdose deaths recorded by the CDC surpassed 92,000, the highest level in decades.

There are multiple factors and drugs besides opioids (methamphetamine, for example) behind the overdose epidemic. CDC overdose data is not always accurate, and overdose deaths often involve multiple drugs, including alcohol. Research shows that only a small percentage of overdose deaths are caused by prescription opioids alone. Illicit drugs containing fentanyl are driving the historic rates of death in part because, unlike prescription drugs, they can vary widely in potency, particularly when law enforcement disrupts the supply. A 2020 study found that 57 percent of 2,887 military veterans who died of overdose or suicide had a prescription to painkillers that was cut off by their doctors.

“I believe that a lot of the industrial binary focus on stopping opioid prescriptions reflects a belief that that will somehow stop overdoses from happening … that if we just stop these patients from receiving the pills they are on, they will be protected,” said Stefan Kertesz, a physician and professor of preventative medicine at the University of Alabama who is studying links between reductions in prescribing and suicides. “That presumption just has not held up, so far.”

At the same time, the government has been slow to lift barriers to the most effective medications for treating opioid addiction and preventing overdose, methadone and buprenorphine, which are heavily scrutinized by police and surveilled by the DEA because they are also prescription opioids.

Nationally, less than 6 percent of doctors are allowed to prescribe buprenorphine under a special federal waiver that medical experts and advocates say must be removed to save lives. The waiver takes a day or so to obtain, but advocates say many doctors don’t bother due to the stigma around treating people with opioid addiction. Like Joshi, numerous doctors who do prescribe buprenorphine have been targeted by the DEA. A study released in May by researchers in Oregon found that one in five pharmacies in counties with high rates of opioid overdose refuse to dispense buprenorphine. The problem is especially prevalent among independent pharmacies, which are often targeted over large companies by drug cops seeking out the latest “pill mill” to bust.

Patients recovering from addiction say buprenorphine is often difficult to access even when it’s stocked by a local pharmacy due to stigma reinforced by fear of law enforcement, but the DEA says it has taken steps to expand access to addiction treatment medication as mandated by Congress and the Biden administration.

A Safer Supply Is Criminalized

In the final days of the Trump administration, James Carroll, President Trump’s drug czar, boasted that the “prescription opioid epidemic is now over.” A major decrease in opioid prescribing and related overdoses, Carroll said, was one of the administration’s major achievements. Critics were irate. How could the Trump administration claim victory when overdose deaths were ballooning on their watch?

Six months earlier, the AMA warned the Trump administration that the overdose crisis had never just been about prescription opioids, and the nation is now facing an unprecedented “multi-factorial” crisis driven by drugs such as illicit fentanyl. The government could no longer view the crisis through a “prescription opioid-myopic lens.” Moreover, chronic pain patients are harmed by the crackdown and the CDC’s prescribing guidelines, which caused large numbers of patients to be forcibly tapered off their medication or cut off altogether, often against their will.

“There is no evidence that forced stoppage of the individual’s medications leads to a better outcome, none,” Kertesz said. “That’s crucial.”

Kertesz pointed to a new study showing that the net effects of policies that encourage doctors to lower the dose of opioids prescribed to patients are uncertain, but rapid discontinuation of opioid therapy is associated with increased risk of overdose and suicide. Abrupt stoppage of opioid therapy has become the “norm,” Kertesz said, and those who argue that policies aimed at decreasing opioid prescribing over the past decade simply represent more “judicious prescribing” practices are misleading the public.

“There are 8 to 10 million people on long-term opioids, and a meaningful number of those people actually need to be on them, so setting up a system that by design abandons 1 to 10 million patients is not a good thing, but we have set that up,” Kertesz said. “We have now set up incentives for doctors and pharmacists to avoid care for those people, many of whom have disabilities.”

In 2018, senior analysts at the CDC revealed that for years, the number of overdose deaths the agency attributed to prescription opioids was vastly inflated due to problems with data collection and classification. For example, deaths caused by illicit fentanyl were blamed on the prescription form of fentanyl, which is often used in emergency rooms. Overdoses involving a combination of drugs were also misclassified. Last year, researchers concluded that, for over a decade, “millions of Americans” were “misled” by the CDC, politicians and the media to believe that the drug overdose crisis was driven by deaths caused by prescription opioids.

Patients prescribed opioids to treat long-term chronic pain are organizing across the country to overturn the CDC guidelines, and the debunking of CDC data and the AMA’s statement validated their cause. In interviews, multiple chronic pain patients said prescription opioids help them live more normal lives, but their lives became collateral damage of the war on opioid prescribing. Patients report that doctors refuse to treat them and pharmacies won’t fill their prescriptions, leaving them in disabling pain. Mothers are punished by hospitals after childbirth and even charged with crimes for continuing opioid therapy prescribed by a doctor during pregnancy.

“Opioids can be used safely during pregnancy, and we also know that when the response is immediately punitive or the application of the criminal legal system, there is actually far worse outcomes for babies and families, instead of being able to work that out with their doctor,” said Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, in an interview.

Chronic pain patients and their advocates argue that the narrative linking opioid prescribing to the overdose epidemic is a “hoax,” and they are engaged in a pitched media battle with the “anti-opioid zealots” who pushed the CDC to discourage long-term opioid prescribing for anyone besides cancer patients and people dying in hospice. Advocates point to research showing that rates of fatal drug overdose  correlate with economic decline  in many communities and have been rising rapidly since the late 1970s, not the mid-1990s when painkiller prescribing became more liberal thanks to campaigns by drug companies that have garnered plenty of headlines. The prescribing debate is extremely emotional, with each side attacking the other over credentials and alleged ties to the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. (Kertesz said he was attacked in the media by an “expert in the field” for simply announcing a study on deprescribing and suicides. “Attacking investigators in the absence of any knowledge of their work would not be customary behavior in any area of medicine,” he said in an email. “But in this topical area, it is.”)

“The way tapering is happening in the real world is just horrible, even for people who are using their medication appropriately,” Nicholson said.

As an addiction specialist working at an emergency room and poison control center in Ohio, Ryan Marino has plenty of experience on the front lines. The narrative that overprescribing is causing an overdose crisis is clearly overblown, Marino said, because reductions in prescribing has not brought down deaths. Marino says he often sees patients who were prescribed high doses of opioids for years until their medication was abruptly tapered or cut off after CDC prescribing “guidelines” became public policy and even law in some states.

“Those patients went through hell … naturally, some turned to street drugs because it is so miserable to have opioids cut off, whether you have addiction or not,” Marino told Truthout. “Seeing those patients has cast an additional shadow over this overdose epidemic that we are seeing, because the over-reactionary response is now creating additional harms.”

Marino said the manufacturing and dispensing of opioids can be a real money-maker in a for-profit health system, and overprescribing played a role early on in the crisis. At the same time, prescription drugs are much safer to use than illicit heroin and fentanyl. Marino said there are good arguments for access to a safe supply of opioids — including prescription heroin for people at high risk of overdose — because people using regulated opioids under medical supervision are far less likely to die.

“We need some sort of regulation [of prescribing], but the oversight the DEA provides seems more in line with reducing prescribing than ensuring that prescribing is appropriate and ensuring that people have access to prescriptions,” Marino said. “The reality is, most people who were using Oxycontin never wanted to switch to heroin, and people who were using heroin never wanted to switch to fentanyl.”

Kertesz, who has worked closely with low-income and houseless patients, also takes a nuanced view of prescribing. Like Marino, Kertesz said there were problems with overprescribing in the past, when medications were heaped upon patients instead of affording them more holistic care. However, abruptly cutting patients off from medicines they depend on can cause all sorts of problems, particularly for people who have trouble consistently accessing health care in the first place. Doctors must make prescribing decisions based on the particular needs of a patient, but the crackdown has siloed prescribing as either “appropriate” or potentially illegal.

“We have now set up an entire system to push a change to care that does not have evidence for being safe or effective for patients,” Kertesz said.

For example, law enforcement often sees a “red flag” when patients are prescribed high doses of opioids or combinations of controlled substances, even when the prescriber is simply continuing the patient on a long-term regimen. While scrutinized by drug police as a sign of criminal activity, Nicholson said some patients benefit from drug combinations under appropriate medical supervision. Kertesz said assuming something “criminal” is going on when patients are prescribed higher doses of opioids or more than one psychoactive drug at a time is “a big leap.” The same goes for other “red flags” drug police look for in statewide prescribing databases and records kept by pharmacies.

“A patient who has filled a script in two pharmacies, or a patient who has traveled a distance … anybody who has multiple complex needs is already suspect, anyone who is rural by definition is suspect,” Kertesz said. “Pharmacists are trying not to lose their jobs, so they transfer all this stigma and burden to patients.”

There is a difference between “drug dependence” and “drug addiction.” Addiction is characterized by impulsive drug use despite adverse consequences. Physiological drug dependence results from the continued use of many medications — not just opioids. Addiction is rare in patients prescribed opioids for pain, and while long-term use can create dependence, the benefits can also outweigh the harms. People living with opioid addiction may also be seeking relief from untreated pain, trauma or mental anguish. Either way, abruptly cutting people off from opioids is dangerous. That’s why methadone and buprenorphine are prescribed for opioid addiction and dependence. Both drugs stabilize patients and stave off painful withdrawal symptoms, which is crucial for preventing overdose.

Advocates say the nuance is lost on the DEA and other law enforcement agencies. Drug cops are laser-focused on opioid “diversion,” the idea prescription opioids are being sold and used outside of their intended purpose. Data on diversion varies by source; a 2017 federal survey found that less than 11 percent of people who misused prescription opioids bought them on the street or stole them from a pharmacy or medical facility. If the rest are “misusing” their own prescriptions or obtaining them from friends and family — an idea that often offends pain patients — then anti-diversion efforts are effectively targeting prescribers and patients themselves.

For years, the government and mainstream media claimed diversion was the source of the overdose crisis, even as the data began telling a much different story. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, for example, that buprenorphine is usually diverted to people living with addiction. Vermont recently decriminalized possession of buprenorphine without a prescription for that reason. The crackdown on diversion created grey areas that turned doctors and pharmacists into suspected drug dealers and patients into suspected criminals. In an ironic way, it worked. Pills became harder to find on the street, but reducing the supply did nothing to treat chronic pain or addiction. Overdoses involving illicit opioids are surging, and a growing chorus of drug users and advocates declare that “every overdose is a policy failure.”

“They Look at Prescribing as a Crime”

Joshi ran a general medical practice in Indiana, and he prescribed opioids for chronic pain as well as addiction. The DEA claimed Joshi was writing more prescriptions for controlled substances than most doctors in Indiana; Joshi says he served a population with serious medical needs. It was the undercover DEA agent’s job to pose as a “drug seeking” patient and catch Joshi in the act of prescribing and secretly record it on video. Joshi says he tended to trust his patients, but trusting the undercover agent was his downfall. He also suspects a former employee wrote fraudulent prescriptions before becoming an informant for the DEA, although he has been unable to prove it.

“They are transplanting people in the health care field as a drug-dealing ring, so I am the captain drug dealer; you snitch on me and you go free,” Joshi said.

Terrified, Joshi accepted a plea deal after he was indicted on multiple drug charges. However, the DEA’s case against him shifted over time and relied on inconsistent witness testimony, leaving a federal judge frustrated when the time came for sentencing, according to a review of court documents. The DEA accused Joshi of recklessly prescribing controlled substances, but prosecutors were unable to produce evidence that his patients did not have legitimate medical needs for the drugs Joshi prescribed. Multiple patients testified that Joshi’s practice made serious improvements in their lives. A day before Joshi was indicted, his clinic was recognized by the National Committee for Quality Assurance for “patient-centered, coordinated care.”

“A lot of people have it a lot worse than I do; there really wasn’t any evidence in my case,” Joshi said. “They essentially made a bunch of false statements.… Just the act of prescribing, it was construed as a crime. They don’t look at the clinical decision-making behind a prescription, they look at prescribing as a crime.”

A young doctor with a new practice and a child on the way, Joshi admits that he made mistakes. After losing his registration to prescribe controlled substances, Joshi says he unknowingly broke state rules by hiring nurse practitioners to write prescriptions for his patients. He also wrote a handful of prescriptions under another doctor’s name. Joshi says he tried to find workarounds out of concern for his patients. He did not want their “continuum of care” to be interrupted, but the judge saw a violation of the law.

“I tried to do what was right for my patients, but that was a deviation against the regulatory policies,” Joshi said.

Joshi was sentenced to 15 months in prison for writing an unnecessary prescription to an undercover DEA agent. He got out a few months early on good behavior. By the time he was sentenced, many of his patients were receiving the same treatment they had received from Joshi from other doctors. Stephanie and Ashley were not so lucky. Both women overdosed and died after law enforcement suddenly interrupted their medical care and their safe supply of medication ran out.

*Ashley’s name has been changed to protect her identity.

This story was updated on July 8, 2021 to include a statement from the DEA.