BALTIMORE, MD (March 16, 2016)– Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen today commended the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recently announced 2016 Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain and called on the agency to provide additional guidance:

“We commend the CDC’s efforts to encourage best practices for prescribing opioids, and support these guidelines as a critical step as our nation continues to combat this public health crisis; however, if we truly want to end this epidemic, we have to go even further.

That’s why in Baltimore we have distributed best practice letters calling on every doctor in the city to co-prescribe the opioid overdose reversal drug, naloxone to any patient receiving opioids and issued the State of Maryland’s first blanket prescription to naloxone, available for the city’s 620,000 residents.

We also know that 1 in 3 unintentional overdose deaths from prescription opioids also involved benzodiazepines, which is why I co-led a coalition of over 40 city health commissioners and state health directors from across the country urging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to require a ‘black box warning’ any time these two medications are prescribed together.

Each day, 44 people in the United Sates die as a result of prescription opioid overdose. If we know there is more we can to help educate physicians and save lives, then we cannot wait. The cost of inaction is far too high.

We applaud the CDC’s guidelines which will bring greater national attention to this issue and call on the agency to provide even more aggressive recommendations to truly curb this public health emergency.”