Insights
White Collar Principal Barbara Rowland Co-Authors Chapter on Drug Enforcement and the Practice of Medicine for the 2015 Health Law Handbook
In the Health Law Handbook's 2015 Edition, Internal Investigations & White Collar Defense Principal Barbara Rowland co-authored the chapter, "Practicing Medicine in a Drug Enforcement World." The chapter explores the legal and regulatory issues arising from federal and state law enforcement of controlled substances and the resulting personal and professional risks to physicians and pharmacists.
The authors note in their introduction:
"DEA's enforcement activities against physicians have increasingly challenged the legitimacy of medical decision making in issuing controlled substances prescriptions and have encompassed the pharmacists and pharmacies filling those prescriptions....DEA has applied the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and its accompanying regulations to create an enforcement regime in areas that were routinely left to state and community medical and pharmacy standards. In DEA's efforts to address prescription drug abuse, its enforcement actions are blurring the traditional line separating DEA legal authority under the CSA and the establishment of standards for medical care."
"As DEA enforcement has grown, physicians are becoming more reluctant to prescribe controlled substances—in particular, for pain management—out of fear of agency action, and pharmacists, too, are unsure whether to fill pain medication prescriptions."
Reprinted from Health Law Handbook, 2015 Edition, with permission of Thomson Reuters. For more information about this publication please visit http://legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/Treatises/Health-Law-Handbook-2015-ed-Health-Law-Series/p/100704935.
Ms. Rowland is grateful for the diligent work of Associate Yune T. Do in researching and assisting with this chapter.