The World Health Organization will discontinue two publications providing guidelines for prescribing opioids in response to accusations from U.S. lawmakers that they were influenced by opioid makers to minimize the dangers of the drugs.
The WHO, the United Nations agency tasked with developing public health guidelines for international use, said Wednesday in a statement to the Wall Street Journal that it was withdrawing the guidance “in light of new scientific evidence” and will “address any issues of conflicts of interest of the experts that have been raised.”
“WHO also recognizes that the need for access to pain relief must be balanced with concerns about the harm arising from the misuse of medications prescribed for the management of pain,” it stated.
U.S. Reps. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., and Hal Rogers, R-Ky., had accused the WHO in an extensive report in May of allowing Purdue Pharma, the American manufacturer of the painkiller OxyContin, to influence the guidelines to downplay the addiction risk of opioids. Opioid overdoses take the lives of 130 people every day.
One of the documents in question “corroborates the oft-repeated Purdue claim that dependence occurs in less than one percent of patients, despite no scientific evidence supporting this claim and a multitude of studies contradicting it,” the Clark-Rogers report stated.
In particular, they flagged the line that “Opioid analgesics, if prescribed in accordance with established dosage regimens, are known to be safe and there is no need to fear accidental death or dependence.”
In another one of the guidelines, the lawmakers noted, “The WHO claims that there is no maximum dosage of strong opioids, like OxyContin, for children.”
“Given our domestic epidemic associated with the abuse and misuse of opioids, I am encouraged by the WHO’s actions to pull back dangerous prescribing guidelines that I fear could fan the flames of abuse on a global scale,” Rogers said in a statement. “I am hopeful the Director-General will take additional steps to mitigate the undue influence of the pharmaceutical industry in the development of WHO policy and to protect patients worldwide from addiction to these powerful narcotics.”
Purdue Pharma is facing some 2,000 lawsuits related to their opioid marketing practices, and have been accused of heavily contributing to the opioid crisis.
“That is a very dangerous situation,” Clark said. “We do not want to see the opioid crisis in this country exported around the globe.”
