Office-Based Practice and Opioid-Use Disorders

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Abstract
In the case of Webb v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Drug Act made it illegal for physicians to prescribe narcotics for the purpose of keeping a patient “comfortable by maintaining his customary use.” For more than 80 years, it remained illegal in the United States for physicians to prescribe opioid medications for the treatment of opioid dependence. The exception was the dispensing of methadone or levomethadyl acetate through regulated programs. Physicians prescribing opioids such as morphine, fentanyl, codeine, hydrocodone, and oxycodone on a long-term basis needed to worry about whether their patients . . .