Woods v. Lynch — Dec. 2016 (Summary)

DEA REGISTRATION

Woods v. Lynch
No. 1:16-CV-01289-STA-egb (W.D. Tenn. Dec. 12, 2016)

The United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee granted a preliminary injunction against the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (“DEA”) waiver requirement as it applied to two physicians with former substance abuse problems.

The plaintiffs are two physicians who had issues with substance abuse in the past which resulted in the surrender of their DEA registrations.  Both had ultimately had the registrations reinstated with full prescribing authority, one in 2002 and the other in 2013.  Both physicians held admitting privileges at the same local hospital where they had been practicing without incident for several years, information of which the DEA was aware.  In late 2016, however, the DEA advised them that they were required to have a waiver in order to work at the hospital.  The physicians claimed that the DEA could not retroactively apply an administrative regulation to them and that doing so would cause them irreparable harm in the form of lost income.

The physicians asserted that they surrendered their licenses voluntarily while pursuing substance abuse treatment and then petitioned the DEA for reinstatement, which was granted by the DEA. It was at that time that the DEA should have addressed the issue of a waiver, which the agency failed to do. The court found that the physicians’ claims, if adjudged accurate, were likely to preclude the DEA from requiring the physicians to sign a waiver to practice because the DEA missed the opportunity to do it earlier.  As such, the court granted the physicians’ request for preliminary injunction against the application of the DEA’s waiver requirement.