FDA Painkilller Rulings

When Heather Dougherty heard the news last week that the Food and Drug Administration had recommended tightening how doctors prescribed the most commonly used narcotic painkillers, she was overjoyed.

Controlled substances are overseen by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which classifies drugs and their prescribing rules into categories called schedules based a medication’s potential for abuse.

Since then, narcotic painkillers, or opioids, have become the most frequently prescribed drugs in the United States and have set off a wave of misuse, abuse and addiction.

Dr. Dougherty told officials in 1999 that more of the patients turning up at his clinic near Syracuse were addicted to legal narcotics like Vicodin and Lortab that contain the drug hydrocodone than to illegal narcotics like heroin.

Experts estimate that more than 100,000 people have died in the last decade from overdoses involving the drugs.

On Friday, public health advocates who had cheered the agency’s decision the day before were dismayed when the F.D.A. approved a new, high-potency painkiller despite an 11-2 vote by an expert panel of its own advisers not to do so.

Fourteen years earlier, her father, Dr. Ronald J. Dougherty, had filed a formal petition urging federal officials to crack down on the drugs.