The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety said Tuesday that it has ferreted out 44 clinics that misused or abused medical opioids, including fentanyl patches.
The 44 medical institutions and their doctors either illegally prescribed fentanyl patches to those in their 10s and 20s or wrongfully used them for themselves. Domestic clinics treating medical drugs must report the records to the regulators.
Regulators suspected these institutes of misusing or abusing the drugs and violated the law by not keep medical records and omitting reports.
According to the enforcement decree of the Narcotics Control Act, regulators suspend the doctors for treating medical narcotics with the support of the Korean National Police Agency and the Health Insurance Assessment and Review Service.
The fentanyl patch is an opioid painkiller used to treat moderate to severe chronic pain. Patients prescribed with the patch attach it to the skin once every three days but abusing the medication could lead to addiction as it has a significantly stronger effect than morphine.
Some clinics prescribed 145 sheets on 32 occasions for about seven months to patients and did not comply with the regulation for usage and dosage. A patient visited three medical institutions for about a month and received 43 prescriptions on five occasions.
Other narcotic analgesics were prescribed to patients below 18 with non-cancer pain only by asking about the symptoms without checking previous records of receiving narcotic analgesics.
The ministry has strengthened inspections due to recent concerns about teenagers abusing fentanyl patches as a recreational drug in Korea. These teenagers hopped local clinics and duplicated prescriptions.
Korea has shown a gradual increase in the use of opioid analgesics. According to the 2020 opioid analgesics misuse and abuse guide published by the National Academy of Medicine of Korea, the number of narcotic painkiller users reached about 6.78 million in 2019, up 51.1 percent from 4.50 million in 2011.
Among those prescribed with related drugs, the number of patients who received prescriptions for more than 90 days in a year also increased to 622,190 in 2019 from 389,214 recorded in 2011, marking a 59.9 percent increase.
The problems have been worsening as the number of patients who died within 30 days after taking the medical narcotics increased from 21,777 to 31,401.
About 50,000 patients die each year from misusing opioids, and 1.7 million suffer from addiction in the U.S.
The food and drug safety ministry expected the recent inspection to make domestic medical institutes pay more attention to the misuse and abuse of medical narcotics, such as fentanyl patches. It also urged doctors not to prescribe or use the fentanyl patch for those with non-cancer pain under 18.
“We will actively use big data to manage medical narcotics and monitor prescriptions to foster an environment where medical narcotics can be safely used,” a ministry official said.