To help bring the opioid epidemic under control, health care regulators have been issuing stricter guidelines and rules on how and when opioids should be prescribed, and it appears the effort is having some effect. In the United States, the proportion of opioid prescriptions for people who had not used them previously fell by 54% between 2012 and 2017. The number of doctors who provided first-time opioid prescriptions fell from around 114,000 to just over 80,000. But among those doctors, high-risk prescriptions (more than a 3-day supply or more than 50 mg of morphine equivalent per day) remain high. Read more in CMAJ.