Whether the phrase 'issued for a legitimate medical purpose by an individual practitioner acting in the usual course of his professional practice' must mean that a doctor has abandoned medical practice and engaged in 'illicit drug dealing and trafficking as conventionally understood

QUESTION PRESENTED Because many controlled substances have medical uses, the Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”) authorizes doctors and other medical practitioners to issue prescriptions. But as this Court has explained, that authority obviously has limits. Specifically, the CSA “bars doctors from using their powers as a means to engage in illicit drug dealing and trafficking as conventionally understood.” Gonzales v. Oregon, 546 U.S. 243, 270 (2006). A doctor, therefore, is criminally liable for unlawfully distributing a controlled substance when acting as “a drug ‘pusher,” and “not as a physician.” United States v. Moore, 423 U.S. 122, 126, 143 (1975). The practice of instructing juries in the Tenth Circuit, however, blurs this clear line between criminal and non-criminal conduct, and allows doctors and other medical practitioners to be convicted of felony drug crimes based on malpractice, or even mere disagreements about the appropriate standard of care. The question presented is: Whether the phrase “issued for a legitimate medical purpose by an individual practitioner acting in the usual course of his professional practice,” as used in 21 C.F.R. § 1306.04 and routinely employed in jury instructions setting forth the elements of an unlawful prescribing charge, must mean that a doctor has abandoned medical practice and engaged in “illicit drug dealing and trafficking as conventionally understood,” and whether juries must be so instructed in order to prevent criminal conviction for malpractice or mere disagreements about the appropriate standard of cate? i