Bill > HRes161

This Resolution expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a government agency responsible for protecting public health, should actively encourage the use of abuse-deterrent formulations of drugs, particularly opioids. Abuse-deterrent formulations are designed to make it harder to misuse or abuse drugs, for example, by making them more difficult to crush or dissolve for injection or snorting. The resolution highlights that when a drug with abuse-deterrent features is developed and approved, the approval of generic versions that lack these features can undermine the public health goals of developing safer drugs. It acknowledges that the FDA has the authority to require generic versions of these reformulated drugs to have similar abuse-deterrent properties and urges the FDA to use this authority to refuse approval of generic versions of non-abuse-deterrent opioids that have been replaced by abuse-deterrent versions, and to mandate that generic versions of abuse-deterrent opioid products possess comparable abuse-deterrent features.