An “alarming” number of US patients received a highly potent form of opioid that is 100 times more powerful than morphine and that they never should have been prescribed, according to a new study.The research, published Tuesday in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the US Food and Drug Administration and opioid manufacturers failed at multiple levels to adequately monitor the restricted use of these types of fentanyl as part of a federal program — and that few substantive changes were made even after officials discovered problems.”We found alarming use of these products in patients who never should have received them,” said G. Caleb Alexander, a senior author of the study and director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“The prescribing of this medicine was supposed to be closely monitored and contained but was not.”What we found was that several years after…