State Dosage Thresholds: Are They Effective?

It’s been said that patients who are on higher doses of morphine equivalence per day are at higher risk of opiate induced respiratory depression and death. But the truth is that patients who are on very high doses of opioids may be very much sicker and they may be at a higher risk of death for other reasons. It’s really very important that the prescribing is tailored to individual patients. In my mind, to have dose thresholds is maddening because there are no uniformly accepted guidelines to what constitutes morphine equivalent. Also, some patients may be ultra-rapid metabolizers of a drug, some may be poor metabolizers, others are in between. And if we could account for that variability, there still the problem of drug interactions. All these factors are largely, if not completely, ignored by all the states who have these dosing thresholds.

Prescribers and pharmacists really should be working together to combat the overdose crisis, For example with respect to in-home naloxone kits, if their state does not allow them to dispense it, pharmacists should notify a physician prescriber that ‘gee, you know your patient has a pretty high risk. I can give them naloxone if you allow me a telephone order to do that.’ And it would be helpful for physicians to get blood levels of some of these opioids that they’re prescribing. In an overdose case, when you’re presented with a toxicology report from a medical examiner, you need to know how that blood level measures up to what the blood level was anti-mortem. One patient may be able to tolerate a level that another can’t, but if you don’t have blood levels to compare against when the patient was alive, that’s a difficult call in court.