No one witnessing a burglary in progress would call 911 and ask for a doctor. Likewise, it makes no sense for a doctor to consult a cop about prescribing medications. Yet in the past decade, law enforcement, driven by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), has taken a large and inappropriate role in monitoring and dictating the amount and kind of pain medications doctors may prescribe. Once this threshold is crossed, doctors are subjected to tactics that would horrify anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Constitution. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided such tactics are unacceptable.

The Supreme Court reined in overzealous prosecutors who arrested doctors for treating their patients as individuals rather than conforming to law enforcement's accepted standards. In Ruan v. United States, the Court overturned a decision that would have sent board-certified pain management specialist Xiulu Ruan to prison for 21 years for not conforming to law enforcement's arbitrary and misguided standards. Ruan was not allowed to introduce expert testimony to argue that his pain management decisions were reasonable and based upon clinical experience as well as his patients' individual needs—a so-called good faith defense.

When the public hears opioids, most reflexively think of prescription pain pills. But the term opioids actually refers to a broad category of drugs, including illicit "street" fentanyl, now widely known as the most dangerous of them all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 77,000 of the 105,000 drug overdose deaths in 2021 are opioid-related, 90 percent of which are due to illicit fentanyl. The rest are mostly due to heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine.

Although fentanyl alone can easily be lethal, the overwhelming majority of overdose deaths are "polysubstance" deaths: opioids mixed with stimulants, sedatives, and alcohol. To wit, nearly 70 percent of the fentanyl deaths also involved mixtures of cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin, while the number involving prescription pills was only 16 percent. In 2020, CDC data showed that a mere 7 percent of fatal overdoses involved prescription opioids alone.