In recent years, the South Korean media have been churning out reports of teens overdosing on Fentanyl, a powerful narcotic analgesic similar to morphine but 50 to 100 times more potent.

To prevent the abuse or misuse of the drug, Rep. Kang Sun-woo of the Democratic Party and 10 other lawmakers on Thursday proposed a revision bill to obligate physicians to check the patient’s history of receiving narcotics for medical uses. The bill aims to impose penalties on doctors who fail to comply with a revised Narcotics Control Act.

Fentanyl is mainly prescribed for patients suffering from severe pain such as terminal cancer patients and those who complain of acute pain after surgery. However, Fentanyl addiction can cause serious adverse events and severe withdrawal symptoms such as vomiting, fatigue, headache, sleep problems, and respiratory depression.

Since March 2021, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has been operating an information network, under the Narcotics Integrated Management System, to inform the history of a patient’s prescribed medications to narcotics-prescribing physicians. When the physician judges that the patient is at risk of overdosing, he or she can refuse to prescribe the drug.

However, in reality, few doctors check the history of narcotics prescriptions through the system, Kang said.

According to Kang’s data, approximately 100,000 doctors prescribed 1 billion narcotics for medical use in 2021. Still, only 2,038 doctors, or 1.9 percent, accessed the government’s information network to check the patient’s history of narcotic drug prescriptions.

News reports said the number of Fentanyl patches prescribed to teenagers skyrocketed to 624 in 2020 from 22 in 2019.

People could get a prescription for Fentanyl by telling an orthopedic surgeon, or a pain medicine specialist, that they have severe backache, said a pain medicine doctor, surnamed Oh, running a clinic in Suyu-dong, Seoul.

Overdosing of Fentanyl patch may be possible through multiple prescriptions of the same drug where a patient lies to a doctor saying the patient lost the drug or the previously-prescribed dose does not work, he explained.

Observers in the medical sector said that a sharp increase in Fentanyl prescriptions for teenagers and 20s over the past year for no apparent reason might be evidence of the increase in the number of wrong prescriptions.

“We can see so many news reports saying that teenagers somehow get Fentanyl patches, break them into small pieces, and sell them online. Some get prescriptions of ‘butterfly drug’ (phentermine hydrochloride) by visiting several clinics in one building like they are shopping,” Kang said.

“I’m arguing that doctors should fully utilize the existing, excellent system to check the patient’s prescription history and prevent the misuse of abuse of medical narcotics.”

However, Lee Tae-yeon, president of the Korean Association of Orthopedic Surgeons, said Kang’s bill was an “absurd” idea.

Lee argued that as far as he knew, no doctor would prescribe Fentanyl “at the request of a patient” and doctors’ role is to treat a patient, not pry into the patient’s privacy.

“A doctor prescribes a certain medicine to treat a patient’s disease. The doctor is not a detective. Whether the patient uses a drug illegally is something that the police should investigate, not the doctor,” he said.

Doctor Oh also agreed that the current prescription information system would be sufficient to monitor the use of narcotic medicines.

“If one hospital’s prescription of Fentanyl shoots up, compared to others, the health authorities and the local public health center will automatically pay much attention to that hospital. Plus, not many pharmacies treat narcotic drugs because it is very demanding to meet the government’s strict requirements,” Oh said.