Gov. Roy Cooper signed the STOP Act of 2017 into law on June 29, 2017. The Act is intended to prevent and reduce prescription opioid misuse, while strengthening North Carolina’s substance use treatment and recovery options.

A primary goal of the STOP Act is to reduce excessive or otherwise inappropriate opioid prescribing. One way the law seeks to achieve this is by imposing limits on how much opioid pain medication can be prescribed for acute pain. The limits do not apply to opioid prescriptions for chronic pain, or to opioid prescriptions for acute pain related to an underlying chronic medical condition, such as a flare of rheumatoid arthritis.

This resource page is dedicated to helping patients and prescribers understand how the STOP Act affects pain prescribing. Send questions or suggestions for additional resources to communications@ncmedboard.org