A warning for doctors:

“Be afraid.”

No matter what you have learned in medical school, if you are prescribing opioids in doses that seems high to narcotics agents and prosecutors, you are at risk of a trial. And once you enter the courtroom, anything can happen.

Federal prosecutors who aren't licensed to practice medicine are increasingly substituting their own judgment for that of doctors who, in the opinion of the Justice Department, are prescribing too many pain pills to their patients. John Tierney explains why physicians who take an aggressive approach to pain management should not

... feel safe until doctors’ prescribing practices are judged by state medical boards, as they were until the D.E.A. and federal prosecutors started using criminal courts to regulate medicine. The members of those state medical boards don’t always make the right judgment, but at least they know that there is more to their job than counting pills.