For a week in late August, the pharmacy students and residents at Penobscot Community Health Care in Bangor, Maine, combed through the prescription records of slightly more than 1,000 patients taking one or more opioid medications, calculating dosages with a new state law in mind.
The new law in Maine, which joins a growing number of states to set limits on opioid prescribing, not only restricts the duration of prescriptions but also sets total daily morphine milligram equivalents (MME) for