Troubling news from my doc about new FDA/DEA guidelines. [View all]

[bluepen]

Sorry in advance for the length of this post...

The basics about my situation: Bad depression. Hospitalized once for it. Full-on panic attacks and many trips to the ER thinking I was dying. That was about 12 years ago. It took me a couple of years to get the right balance of Zoloft and Xanax that have made me live a fairly normal life, and I have been for a little over a decade now.

So today I go to my doc for the routine med check and new prescriptions for a few months.

She tells me I’m taking too much Xanax. (For the record it is a low dose: .25mg up to 3x daily as needed - I sometimes don’t even take that much - and 1mg when I go to bed.)

New FDA/DEA guidelines, she tells me, and gives me the form pictured below. She explains this is practice-wide and anyone taking opioids or benzodiazepines is getting this. (I later confirm this when a nurse tells me it’s been hard dealing with patients who are stressed about it, and then I hear another patient at checkout expressing concern.)

So after ten years of living a fairly normal life, the new plan is to get me off the Xanax. Right.

I wonder how the FDA and DEA are going to deal with the doctor shopping, pharmacy jumping, and illegal market they’re going to create with this?

The fill-in-the-blanks nature of the form is suspicious to me, as well as the blanket “should not be used for more than four weeks” statement.

I kind of wonder whether this practice is under some kind of scrutiny.

Anyone else getting this news, specifically about benzodiazepines? Has this already BEEN news and I just missed it?