“Please do not make the end of life harder for me,” wrote Lynda Bluestein, 75, of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Many of the comments - including nearly 10,000 delivered in person to DEA offices - came from doctors and patients protesting the effect of the rule on seriously ill and dying patients. Lonny Shavelson, a California physician who chairs the American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid in Dying, a coalition of doctors who help patients access care under so-called right-to-die laws.Īmong the biggest complaints: The rule would delay or block access for patients who seek medically assisted suicide and hospice care, critics said. “They completely forgot that there was a population of people who are dying,” said Dr. It also cracks down on how doctors can prescribe other less-addictive drugs, like Xanax, used to treat anxiety, and buprenorphine, a narcotic used to treat opioid addiction. Given the ongoing opioid epidemic, allowing continued broad use of telemedicine prescribing “would pose too great a risk to the public health and safety,” the proposed rule said. The aim is to reduce improper prescribing of these drugs by telehealth companies that boomed during the pandemic. Drug Enforcement Administration has proposed a rule that would reinstate most previously longstanding requirements that doctors see patients in person before prescribing narcotic drugs such as Oxycontin, amphetamines such as Adderall, and a host of other potentially dangerous drugs. Online prescribing rules for controlled drugs were relaxed three years ago under emergency waivers to ensure critical medications remained available during the COVID-19 pandemic. “She wanted to just go to sleep and not wake up.” “How much should one person suffer?” said Sheridan’s daughter, Georgene White, 68. Soon, others who seek Sheridan’s final option may find it out of reach, the unintended result of a federal move to roll back online prescribing of potentially addictive drugs allowed during the COVID-19 pandemic. 17, surrounded by three of her children, Sheridan drank a lethal dose of drugs prescribed by a doctor she had never met in person, only online. At age 93, struggling with the effects of a stroke, heart failure and recurrent cancer, Teri Sheridan was ready to end her life using New Jersey’s law that allows medically assisted suicide - but she was bedbound, too sick to travel.

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