The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a proposed rule on the importation of certain drugs from Canada.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the following parameters for the defined standard Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit for 2020:

Everybody knows that you shouldn’t drink and drive. However, not everyone knows that prescription drugs can also impair a person’s ability to drive, or operate machinery. Even if they do know, they may not think that the impairment is significant enough to warrant avoiding the activity. Interestingly, while drunk driving has decreased, driving while on prescription or illegal drugs has increased.

In January 2017, an NBC news investigation found that an “epidemic” of opioid abuse had helped turn the once-prosperous city of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, into “the most unhappy place in America.” Working in the epicenter of the “scourge” that had resulted in 137 fatal overdoses in a county of only 318,000 people in 2016, the coroner reported that opioid addiction was “eating away at the core of society.”¹ Although an extreme example, Wilkes Barre’s unhappy experience is being repeated in communities throughout the United States, resulting in problems that you probably recognize—and a few that you may not be aware of.