Ballantyne JC, Fleisher LA. Ethical issues in opioid prescribing for chronic pain. Pain. 2010;148(3):365-367.We are writing both to respond to Ballantyne and Fleisher's 2010 article on the ethics of opioid prescribing [1] and to join the authors in calling for continued progress in rational, ethical, and practical decision making surrounding the use of opioids in the treatment of patients with noncancer chronic pain. Given the current state of knowledge regarding long-term opioid treatment, we suggest that dilemmas associated with this treatment are best approached using patient-centered clinical ethics. We believe principle-based, deontological, and classical Hippocratic ethical approaches have less relevance in sorting out current controversies surrounding opioid treatment.We agree with the authors' concise history of how opioid use in medicine has most often been determined by fearful attitudes and politics [1] and rarely arrived at rationally [2], let alone through application of ethical models or evidence-based practice [3]. We welcome exactly this sort of thoughtful reflection on the ethical implications of opioid prescription for chronic painful illness. Ballantyne and Fleisher accurately reflect expert consensus that the most difficult clinical dilemmas involving opioid analgesics arise in treating chronic nonmalignant pain, not acute postinjury or perioperative pain [4,5] or even terminal painful illness [6][7][8]. Even though there is widespread consensus about the majority of uses for opioids for chronic malignant pain, approximately 50 percent of cancer patients still face barriers to pain care [9]. If this is the status of pain care in cancer, an area about which there is reasonable ethical consensus, it is not surprising that noncancer chronic pain is even less adequately addressed. This discrepancy highlights the need to work toward greater agreement on solutions to the ethical questions involved in delivery of care to patients with this kind of pain [10,11].Ballantyne and Fleisher trace the most recent wave of arbitrary limitations on opioid prescribing to the early twentieth century, when physician influence on treatments offered to patients began a steady decline. This decreasing influence has been ascribed to a combination of factors, including increased regulation of the manufacture, trade, and prescription of opioids; stigmatization of opioids through special prescribing requirements and criminalization of addiction [1]; expanded tracking and limitation of physician practice through "managed" care; attention to control of medical "utilization";