Since 2017, the Medical Board of California has been prosecuting doctors who wrote opiate prescriptions for patients who allegedly died from drug overdoses per their death certificates from 2012 to 2013. It sounded like a well meaning idea but in practice, it has decimated the field of pain management and brought tremendous sufferings to patients living with real legitimate pain. When these doctors have their licenses revoked or were forced into retirement, it caused the remaining doctors to stop writing pain medicine prescriptions or taking care of chronic pain patients at all out of fear of persecution. This has caused a marked increase in pain, suffering and suicide rates in the pain and addiction patient populations as well as the subsequent rise in the use of street opioids and thus opioid deaths overall.

The project itself was poorly designed and targets the medical doctors who treat chronic pain patients by medications in lieu of surgery, injections or therapy. It also expects these doctors to follow the standard of care not published by the state until 2015 and by the CDC until 2016. That's like jailing or fining someone for not wearing a mask in January-March of 2020 causing a nursing home patient to die when the CDC was still figuring out which guidelines for us to use.

Thus the Death Certificate project is not only harmful to California by removing hundreds of law abiding doctors from the medical system just as the Covid pandemic struck but it may be responsible for the rise in synthetic opioid use and deaths since 2017 as well as the uptick in suicides from the chronic pain populations since then. We need to stop confusing chronic pain patients with drug users and we need to stop criminalizing the prescribing of pain medicines.  

We need to stop the Death Certificate Project now.