Responsibility for Prescription Drug Abuse

“Misuse of Pain Drug Linked to Hearing Loss” (Sept. 10) brings to light an important aspect of drug abuse: the potential for substances to cause varied and sometimes nonintuitive effects. However, I must take exception to the implication that physicians are responsible for the epidemic of prescription drug abuse in this country.

Our efforts to combat prescription drug abuse are hampered by our fragmented, litigious society. Though most physicians leave the decision to prescribe narcotic painkillers to a patient’s primary care doctor, many drug abusers have multiple physicians whom they see as their “primary doctor” and from whom they receive medications filled at several different pharmacies. With no way of knowing of the existence of the other sources, a physician may prescribe an appropriate and tightly regulated amount and still be part of an addiction problem. Furthermore, recent legal precedents in which physicians have been successfully sued for not providing a narcotic-tolerant individual with adequate narcotics have made physicians wary of straying too far on either end of the spectrum.

In the end, the responsibility for prescription drug abuse must rest solely on the abuser. As physicians, we cannot follow our patients home and monitor their every move.

DR. AAMER JAMALI

Simi Valley