DEA telemedicine controlled-substance prescribing flexibility -- extension history
Under the Ryan Haight Act a practitioner may normally prescribe a controlled substance only after at least one in-person evaluation of that patient. In March 2020 the DEA suspended that requirement for the COVID-19 public health emergency, and since the emergency ended on 11 May 2023 the suspension has been kept alive only by a chain of temporary rules -- four of them so far, each amending 21 CFR 1307.41 and 42 CFR 12.1 to push one expiry date to a later one, with a permanent 'special registration' rule still only a proposal. This asset is one record per temporary rule, carrying the rule's own DATES statement, the date it extended the flexibility to, and the earlier expiry date it replaced, each quoted from that rule's own Federal Register document. Two things make the history worth assembling. First, the dates are easy to get wrong: the First Temporary Rule is dated 'effective May 11, 2023, through November 11, 2024', but the general flexibility under it actually ran only to 11 November 2023 -- the extra year applied solely to practitioner-patient relationships already established by that date. Second, each rule is a standalone document that supersedes the last without amending it, so a reader who lands on any one of the first three sees a deadline that has already passed with nothing on the page to say so. The newest rule's preamble does narrate the earlier three in prose, which is where a careful reader can reconstruct the sequence; this asset states it as four dated, separately-sourced records instead.
The data
| Temporary rule | Published | Federal Register citation | Document number | Effective period as stated | Flexibility extended through | Longer extension for a narrower group | Expiry date this rule replaced |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Extension 1: First Temporary Rule | 05/10/2023 | 88 FR 30037 | 2023-09936 | This rule is effective May 11, 2023, through November 11, 2024. | November 11, 2023 | through November 11, 2024, but only with respect to patients with whom the prescribing practitioner has a telemedicine relationship established via COVID-19 telemedicine prescribing flexibilities on or before November 11, 2023 | |
| Extension 2: Second Temporary Rule | 10/10/2023 | 88 FR 69879 | 2023-22406 | As of November 11, 2023, the end of the effective period for the temporary rule published at 88 FR 30037 on May 10, 2023, is extended from November 11, 2024, to December 31, 2024. This rule is effective November 11, 2023. | December 31, 2024 | November 11, 2023 | |
| Extension 3: Third Temporary Rule | 11/19/2024 | 89 FR 91253 | 2024-27018 | This rule is effective January 1, 2025, through December 31, 2025. | December 31, 2025 | December 31, 2024 | |
| Extension 4: Fourth Temporary Rule | 12/31/2025 | 90 FR 61301 | 2025-24123 | This rule is effective January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2026. | December 31, 2026 | December 31, 2025 |
Where this came from
Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 4 sources this dataset was assembled from.
- federalregister.govhttps://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/05/10/2023-09936/temporary-extension-of-covid-19-telemedicine-flexibilities-for-prescription-of-controlled
- federalregister.govhttps://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/10/2023-22406/second-temporary-extension-of-covid-19-telemedicine-flexibilities-for-prescription-of-controlled
- federalregister.govhttps://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-27018
- federalregister.govhttps://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/31/2025-24123/fourth-temporary-extension-of-covid-19-telemedicine-flexibilities-for-prescription-of-controlled
Machine-readable
- data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
- Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
- How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.
From your own code
Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.
pip install refsource
refsource lookup dea-telemedicine-prescribing-flexibility-extensions extension_number="Extension 1: First Temporary Rule"
npx -y refsource lookup dea-telemedicine-prescribing-flexibility-extensions extension_number="Extension 1: First Temporary Rule"