The Opioid Epidemic

Zohydro Draws Ire of Docs, WC Payers

Physicians and advocacy groups are taking a stand against the FDA’s approval of a new extended release opioid.
By: | October 15, 2014

On Sept. 28, 2,000 members and supporters of the Fed Up! Coalition marched on Washington, D.C. in the hope of getting the federal government to pay more attention to the opioid epidemic currently thriving in the U.S.

The Fed Up! Coalition is an umbrella group of medical professionals, addiction treatment experts and consumer groups who oppose the FDA’s actions when it comes to releasing and marketing opioid painkillers.

“Between 1999 and 2011, 175,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses. That’s 145,000 from painkillers, and 30,000 from heroin,” said Andrew Kolodny, M.D., president of the advocacy group Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. “And we haven’t heard one word from the president. He’s not seeing that his agencies are working in a coordinated fashion to make the crisis worse. He’s even cut spending on addiction treatment.”

The latest installment in the conflict is the FDA’s approval of Zohydro ER in October of last year. The extended release drug that contains at least double the amount of hydrocodone found in Vicodin was approved despite an 11-2 vote by the FDA advisory committee to keep it off the market. It also lacks abuse deterrent features such as an anti-crushing design.

It will take several years to determine what kind of impact a powerful painkiller like Zohydro will have on workers’ compensation care, but the reaction to the FDA’s apparently lenient approval process demonstrated increased awareness of opioid addiction in the U.S. and renewed efforts to stem the flow in new drugs into the market.

“Had the FDA been doing its job in the late ’90s, we wouldn’t have this epidemic.”— Dr. Andrew Kolodny, president, Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing

“Approval of Zohydro was just one very bad decision in a long line of bad decisions by the FDA all clearly putting the interest of industry ahead of public health,” Kolodny said.

That long line of bad decisions began, according to Kolodny, with the approval of Oxycontin in 1995 and decision by its manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, to market the drug as a treatment for common chronic conditions like low back pain. Such highly addictive drugs should only be indicated for end of life care as a comfort measure, or for short periods of severe acute pain, he said.

“I don’t think any of these types of opioids have a particular purpose for anyone other than the very end stages of life, for comfort measures only. And even then, I don’t think this should be released without abuse deterrent technology,” said Sherri Hickey, director of medical management for Safety National. “When you increase the dosage, there comes a point when the drug no longer relieves pain and will actually cause pain. We’ll see an increase in this condition – hyper-algesia – when Zohydro hits the market here.”

“Had the FDA been doing its job in the late ‘90s, we wouldn’t have this epidemic,” Kolodny said. “Even had they started to do their job in early 2000s, if they had narrowed the indication on the label, so drug companies couldn’t market them for chronic pain, the epidemic never would have gotten as bad. Not only didn’t they do that, they changed the rules to make it easier for drug companies to get new opioids on the market. They opened the spigot. The FDA also spent 10 years blocking up-scheduling of hydrocodone combination products.”

Kolodny and Hickey both say Zohydro’s impact on the market has so far been minimal, possibly due to the bad press surrounding it. Hickey said Safety National has only one patient out of the thousands in its system taking the painkiller.

The FDA defended their position in an article published in the Journal of The American Medical Association, stating that criticisms of Zohydro really applied to extended-release opioids as a whole and would require broader policy changes to address. It said, for example, that abuse-deterrent features have not been validated by enough solid evidence to justify including such technology in the manufacture of Zohydro.

It made the determination that “Zohydro ER met the current safety and efficacy standard for approval,” and cited other efforts it had made “improve the safe use of the class,” including working toward “better and more comprehensive abuse-deterrent formulations available across the class of opioids” and tightening safety labeling to “clarify the intended patient population.”

It also claimed that fears surrounding Zohydro are overblown, citing the low levels at which it has been prescribed. In July 2014, the article said, Zohydro “represented 0.23 percent of the 1.6 million ER/LA opioid analgesic prescriptions and .02 percent of the nearly 18 million prescriptions dispensed for all opioid analgesics during the month.” The FDA encouraged critics to broaden their focus to “the more than 100 other opioid products on the market – the known drugs that have caused serious public health consequences for more than a decade.”

As of April, two states – Vermont and Massachusetts – issued rules specific to Zohydro, requiring physicians to consult state prescription drug monitoring programs, screen patients for abuse risk and document medical need before turning to the drug. If such practices can indeed spread to other high strength opioids, the FDA may get the message that healthcare providers and workers’ comp payers are indeed fed up.

Katie Dwyer is a freelance editor and writer based out of Philadelphia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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