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Speak Out
How should the government fight painkiller abuse?
Last month, the Obama administration made the latest move in the government’s war on drugs.
But it wasn’t against controlled substances like cocaine and heroin, or concoctions like crystal meth. It was against prescription painkillers – which, obtained from a doctor, can be legal.
In the past decade, a wave of new and extremely potent pain medications have been developed – OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin, to name a few of the more recognizable ones. With them has come an increase in misuse (crushing and snorting pills that are meant to be slowly released through digestion), abuse (getting pills constantly, through fraudulent prescriptions) and the deaths that result from those behaviors.
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), painkillers caused fewer than 4,000 deaths in 2000. By 2007, they caused over 11,000 deaths. (Compare this to 5,000 deaths from cocaine in 2007, or 2,000 deaths from heroin.)
In April, the Obama administration proposed legislation that would seek to reduce deaths from painkiller abuse by 15 percent in five years. It would do this through two primary means: monitoring painkiller prescriptions and providing better training to pharmacists who dole them out.
Dr. Janet Woodcock of the CDC told the Associated Press, “There has been a flood of new medicines and many of the physicians out there weren't trained in using them, so there’s a big gap in understanding how to manage these drugs.”
The White House plan would also require all states to have a program to monitor painkiller prescriptions, through physician and pharmacist-accessible databases. Now, 35 states have such programs running, while eight others have programs in place but not active.
Mandating painkiller databases across the 50 states would cut down on the ability of addicts to hit up multiple doctors and pharmacists – one Florida youth was reportedly able to round up 240 pills a month from various clinics before he was struck by a car while high and killed in 2009. It would also reduce the ability of dealers to round up large numbers of prescriptions from doctors and distribute them to other states, as would it help identify doctors who issue excessive prescriptions.
However, opponents think the cost of training these physicians and pharmacists, and implementing monitoring programs, imposes an unfair burden. The federal government would reportedly provide grants for initial expenses, but the cost of sustaining the trainings would fall on the states – and the physicians and pharmacists. Lawmakers in New Hampshire, one of the states resistant to the White House plan, say this hurts independent businesses. National drugstore chains like Rite Aid and CVS would have no problem shouldering this cost; the small-town pharmacist, not so much.
Privacy is another concern – the fear that a database of sensitive personal information accessible to every doctor, pharmacist and health-care provider could be easily compromised – as is an overreaching government.
In a USA Today op-ed piece, New Hampshire Rep. Carol McGuire wrote that “one claimed benefit of a monitoring program is that doctors, reassured that their patients are not abusing prescription drugs, will be able to treat pain without fear of being targeted by the Drug Enforcement Administration for ‘overprescribing.’ Creating a new government program to fix problems with an existing program is a sure formula for ever-expanding, always problematic government.”
Even if the White House plan is passed and prescription-drug abuse is reduced, some worry that those users will turn elsewhere – perhaps to harder drugs, such as heroin. In a Columbus Dispatch interview, Dr. Robert Taylor of Ohio State University’s Medical Center said, “We’re attacking the supply side, but there’s a demand side to all of this.”
What do you think?
How should the government fight painkiller abuse? What about training programs? Are those programs too costly? Should states monitor painkiller prescriptions? Is monitoring an invasion of privacy? What about the possibility that users will turn elsewhere? Join the discussion!
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