The ongoing growing amount of drug abuse in our nation, particularly with prescription pain relievers known as opioids, has prompted a lot of talk about the potential of opioids with “abuse-deterrent” properties to help combat this public health problem. But care must be taken in putting too much promise into abuse-deterrent technology at this time because the science is still relatively new and evolving.
While the FDA strongly supports the development of products with effective abuse-deterrent properties and believes they can make a real difference, abuse-deterrent properties do not make an opioid impossible to abuse, and do not prevent overdose and death – they only makes certain kinds of abuse more difficult or less rewarding.
Currently available products with abuse-deterrent properties are an important step in the right direction, but there is much more work to be done. The technologies involved in abuse deterrence and methods for evaluating whether those technologies actually deter abuse are rapidly evolving. To address this rapid change, FDA is working with many drug makers to advance the science of abuse deterrence and to help them navigate the regulatory path to market as quickly as possible. While FDA strongly supports a transition to opioids with abuse-deterrent properties, we do not believe it is feasible or in the interest of public health at this time to require all opioid products to have such properties.
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