As a member of the chronic pain community for 37 years, I applaud the effort to mitigate the risks and potential negative outcomes of freely or rather, hastily prescribing opioid medications for acute, chronic, and intractable pain. However, the knee-jerk reaction to a decades-long issue (the management of (chronic) intractable pain), has resulted in far greater harm than the initiative to reign in prescribing opioid medications supposedly intended to prevent. The harm is as clear as day and yet the system, the government, the vast majority of the medical community, and of course the mainstream media repeatedly refuse to publicly address the issue, they sweep chronic pain refugees under the rug, and they continue to work toward lowering the daily dose of opioid medications and in doing so causing irreparable harm. It does not take much effort to look around Facebook groups and other social media networks to gain perspective on the ubiquitous resultant harm and suffering among people with (chronic) intractable pain and to then garner some insight into the multitude of problems that have been caused by the prohibition of opioids in the treatment of chronic pain. Many patients who have been abandoned now have a suicide plan in place, many are now suffering from clinical depression, many people have lost their jobs and families, and a staggering number of people have actually committed suicide as a direct result of having been forcibly titrated down from their historically stable dose or removed from their medications entirely. The last time I checked our veterans are committing suicide at a rate of twenty-two people per day and sadly many of these deaths are also a direct result of having lost their pain medications and therefore their quality of life. It is certainly logical to keep track of physicians who prescribe opioid analgesic medications with the primary intent of preventing unscrupulous "doctors" from establishing unsafe clinics which historically came to be known as "pill mills". The government needs to publicly admit that pill mills have been entirely eradicated. The DEA must stop strongarming doctors and threatening their practices. The DEA knows full well that just because a physician treats patients from out of state it does not mean they are a pill mill. Many physicians are seeing refugees from other states because far too many physicians in the patient's home state have either stopped practicing pain medicine, their waiting lists are months and even years long, or they are unable to find a physician that is willing to prescribe the dose they need in order to work, go to college, care for their families, and to simply not writhe in bed all day and all night. While I realize travel from one state to another in the past was often a sign of an unscrupulous practice that simply is not the case in this day and age. The vast majority, if not all, of the bad "physicians", have been weeded out of the system. We must move forward with a more thoughtful, logical, practical, and humane solution. Providing incentive to medical practitioners (basically by bullying them with the notion that they will be tracked like cattle and pinged if they prescribe too high a dose and especially to too many patients), not to prescribe opioids for pain management and certainly never above the (unsubstantiated) guidelines set by the CDC and its anti-opioid cohorts, will cause harm to legitimate patients and result in another uptick in overdoses caused by illicit sources. By persecuting physicians that are still willing to live by their oath and treat people with chronic pain the system is creating an unintended consequence of patients who will choose to self-medicate rather than commit suicide. Furthermore, by favoring physicians that refuse to take on the refugees of the Drug War aka the war on prescription opioids the system is taking away the physician's right to choose to care for patients that no one else wants to take the time to care about. Is this the legacy the system wants to leave for future generations? During a time of great doubt, the system chose to err on the side of supposed caution and began a slow descent into the prohibition of historically safe opioid medications (in comparison to the majority of alternatives), and used biased PROPaganda via mainstream media to generate hysteria over the evils of opioid addiction which everyone involved knows the risk of which is astonishingly low. As the system works to improve prescribing practices among practitioners it should be advised not only to reward physicians for keeping daily opioid doses as low as possible by following the CDC guidelines but the system should also be set up to reward the physicians that choose to handle the tougher cases, the patients that are rapid opioid metabolizers, the patients who require an ultra-high dose due to tolerance, and all the outliers that no one truly understands... because, here in lay the real meaning of medicine and of being a caregiver. By speaking for and standing by those who are unwanted by most other practitioners, a physician becomes the very embodiment of healing. In their ability to guide their patient through their most horrific of symptoms caused by their illness/disease/injury - chronic, unrelenting, intractable pain the true healer should never need to be afraid of a system that is supposed to protect everyone involved. We must move to better educate prescribers, dispensers, and patients alike. The system and policymakers need to realize that "over-prescribing" does not relate to physicians that prescribe high doses to certain patients with life-altering, unrelenting, and chronic intractable pain. The term itself is very misleading. A more fitting description should be something like "freely prescribed" with emphasis on the past tense while making certain the public knows this is no longer happening. However, on that note, the system must realize and correct the fact that far, far too many legitimate chronic intractable pain patients who lost their medications due to the perverted policies and fear mongering among physicians still need their medications returned to them and until every single patient that has been abandoned by their doctor has been reevaluated and returned to their prior level of functioning we simply cannot celebrate that prescriptions are down in number. I am running out of time to write and so I just want to leave you with one last thought. Please, for the love of god, think twice about the policies you are creating. Be careful with how you justify their necessitation. Be more humane and a lot more patient with actual science. We have a lot more to learn about chronic pain and subjective illnesses like chronic pain will always be in question but, in all reality, it doesn't have to be that way because we can have faith in one another and we can trust. Thank you.