This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 1st, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Following the science is all the rage.

Well, kind of.

But during the pandemic, one group that's largely been forgotten, people dependent on large amounts of pain medication.

For helping those people following the science would be a refreshing change of pace.

Cato's Jeff Singer argues that crystallizing current science in law

means creating no room for new data to inform the application of law to medicine.

Everybody nowadays is when it comes to policy making is very concerned about following the science, but yet we have

policies in place in all 50 states in a District of Columbia regarding how health care practitioners

prescribe opioids to patients that are not following the science.

In fact, they work against following the science.

So for example, in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

the CDC issued guidelines for prescribing opioids for patients in chronic pain

because the CDC felt it was necessary to do something

about the opioid-related overdose death rate that had been, you know, reaching

historic levels.

And when they published their guidelines, they said explicitly that much of what we are going to tell you is based upon what they call type for evidence, which is mostly observational, incomplete, limited studies that could be subject to change and revision.

And they said, so take everything we say with a grain of salt and also

what we're telling you is not intended to be prescriptive but rather to serve as

an aid as a rule of thumb for practitioners to use who always should know their patients situations better than we do and should individualize treatment.

And among the, so based upon that they suggested maximum amount of pills that

...