Disclosure: I served as a consultant to the Committee on Pain Management and Regulatory Strategies to Address Prescription Opioid Abuse.
Last year, FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to appoint a committee to study the role of opioids in pain management and the opioid epidemic, and, among other things, to provide the agency with recommendations on the options available to it to address the epidemic. Today that committee’s report was released. As noted above, I served as a consultant to the committee—and I will let the report speak for itself. But there is a lot in the report that may be of interest to the FDA law and policy crowd, and I look forward to hearing reactions to the report and the recommendations included in it.