Assessing the impact of a restrictive opioid prescribing law in West Virginia

BACKGROUND: The Opioid Reduction Act (SB 273) took effect in West Virginia in June 2018. This legislation limited ongoing chronic opioid prescriptions to 30 days’ supply, and first-time opioid prescriptions to 7 days’ supply for surgeons and 3 days’ for emergency rooms and dentists. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of this legislation on reducing opioid prescriptions in West Virginia, with the goal of informing future similar policy efforts. METHODS: Data were requested from the state Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) including overall number of opioid prescriptions, number of first-time opioid prescriptions, average daily morphine milligram equivalents (MME) and prescription duration (expressed as “days’ supply”) given to adults during the 64 week time periods before and after legislation enactment. Statistical analysis was done utilizing an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) interrupted time series analysis to assess impact of both legislation announcement and enactment while controlling secular trends and considering autocorrelation trends. Benzodiazepine prescriptions were utilized as a control. RESULTS: Our analysis demonstrates a significant decrease in overall state opioid prescribing as well as a small change in average daily MME associated with the date of the legislation’s enactment when considering serial correlation in the time series and accounting for pre-intervention trends. There was no such association found with benzodiazepine prescriptions. CONCLUSION: Results of the current study suggest that SB 273 was associated with an average 22.1% decrease of overall opioid prescriptions and a small change in average daily MME relative to the date of legislative implementation in West Virginia. There was, however, no association of the legislation on first-time opioid prescriptions or days’ supply of opioid medication, and all variables were trending downward prior to implementation of SB 273. The control demonstrated no relationship to the law. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13011-021-00349-y.