Maine: Vets can’t write opiates for pet if owner is over state’s daily opiate limit – WTF ?

Dr. Gary Stuer examines Pearl at the Bethel Animal Hospital on Tuesday afternoon. Stuer prescribes pain medication for the 3-year-old dog.Maine veterinarians say new pain meds law puts animals, humans at risk

https://bangordailynews.com/2017/03/29/news/state/maine-veterinarians-say-new-pain-meds-law-puts-animals-humans-at-risk/

LEWISTON, Maine — When one of Gary Stuer’s four-legged patients gets injured, has surgery or is living with cancer, the Bethel veterinarian prescribes pain medicine.

Sometimes that pain medicine is an opioid.

“For years, we’ve had non-steroidal drugs, and we call that pain medication, but it’s like you or I taking ibuprofen,” he said. “For pure pain control, we have to rely on opioid-like drugs.”

But while Stuer likes such drugs for controlling animals’ pain, he doesn’t like what he has to do now to prescribe them.

 

Namely, check a human’s private prescription records.

“It really, really makes me uncomfortable to have to look at their history of opiates and then make a decision about their animals based on that,” Stuer, who owns the Bethel Animal Hospital, said.

He’s not alone. Veterinarians across the state are frustrated by their role in a new state law that was designed to curb drug abuse by setting limits on opioid prescriptions and requiring doctors to check the state’s controlled substances prescription monitoring database before writing prescriptions.

Vets say the law’s goal is laudable, but in their line of work, the new requirements don’t help and are a hassle at best and potentially dangerous at worst.

“If somehow someone got into it (they could note), ‘Gee, this person has OxyContin. Their house would be a good house to go rob,’” veterinarian Erich Baumann, co-owner of the Animal Emergency Clinic of Mid-Maine in Lewiston, said.

The law, Chapter 488, passed last year as emergency legislation, went into effect Jan. 1. It strictly limits opioid prescriptions for chronic and acute pain, except for people with cancer, in hospice, receiving palliative care or using the medication for addiction treatment. It also requires doctors, including vets, to check the state’s prescription monitoring database before prescribing and to refuse to write a prescription if the patient is over the new state-imposed limit.

Violators can be fined $250 per incident, up to $5,000 per year.

“We’re certainly aware of and sympathetic to the underlying push for this law. The opiate crisis and overdosing is a tragedy,” veterinarian Gail Mason, who co-owns the Bath-Brunswick Veterinary Associates and Portland Veterinary Specialists, said. “We’re responsible people and willing to do our part.”

Not all of Maine’s hundreds of veterinarians prescribe controlled substances, but many do — particularly when treating dogs or cats. They use a range of drugs, including tramadol and buprenorphine for pain, benzodiazepines for anxiety and hydrocodone for persistent coughing.

But Mason and other vets say they haven’t seen a problem with people taking their animals’ medications — possibly because most pet prescriptions are written for a fraction of the amount that would cause significant effects in humans. They say the solution hurts more than it helps.

“In general, definitely, veterinarians seem quite unhappy about it, mostly ethically concerned about checking a human’s information at all,” veterinarian Amanda Bisol, legislative chairwoman for the Maine Veterinary Medical Association and owner of Animal Medical Clinic in Skowhegan, said. “Part of it is because we don’t know anything about human medicine, and it’s actually quite different. The dosages and things for most pharmaceuticals are very different for humans and animals. We’re looking information up (in the database), and we don’t know how to interpret what we’re finding.”

Veterinarians’ other complaints about the law include the following:

— They don’t know whose prescription records they should be searching for within a family, when a pet-sitter brings in or picks up the animal or when the pet is cared for by a rescue organization with multiple volunteers.

— They don’t like the potential liability that comes with being able to access the database.

— They don’t like saying no to treating an animal’s pain.

— The database doesn’t allow vets to enter their prescriptions, so someone could get multiple medications from multiple vets without it being noted anywhere.

“It doesn’t serve any purpose except for me to humiliate a client, violate their privacy and then look at them and try to decide, ‘Hmm, are you a user?’” Mason said. “It’s beyond the purview of our practice as veterinarians, and it’s unreasonable for the law to ask us to do this.”

Some vets want to be excluded from the law completely. Mason wants Maine to do what she’s heard other states have done: have vets log prescriptions into a database and let software flag it if there’s a problem.

“I can’t live with (the current law),” Mason said. “I don’t want to access people’s medical records. I’m not their physician.”

The Maine Department of Health and Human Services is crafting new rules around the law. The department is expected to have those rules done by March 31.

A department spokeswoman declined to comment because the department is in the rulemaking process.

Vets hope the department’s rule changes will address their concerns. If they don’t, the veterinary association plans to push for changes within current law or try to get a new law passed.

In the meantime, some vets have started asking clients for permission to check their medication history when they write an opioid prescription. In Bethel, Stuer and his two associates have done so about 30 times in the past month. At the emergency clinic in Lewiston, Baumann does so several times per shift.

So far, no client has balked at either clinic.

“I still feel like it’s an invasion,” Stuer said.

Mason, however, hasn’t sought her clients’ prescription information and she doesn’t plan to. She believes she’s not alone.

“There are those of us who are not going to comply,” she said. “We’re just not.”

 

3 Responses

  1. This is unacceptable! The corrupt lawmakers are doing everything they can to continue to cause harm, pain and suffering onto the chronically ill and now our beloved furbabies. NOONE BUT OUR DRS SHOULD HAVE ACCESS TO OUR MEDICAL/PHARMACY RECORDS PERIOD!! This is clearly an abuse of power, I do NOT Appreciate a vet having access to my private records, amd you can sure as hell believe that none of these corrupt lawmakers are being treated in such a degrading way. Screw all of you lawmakers! When the rest of the people of this country wake up and realize that the corrupt government is committing genocide onto the pain community in every way possible, and now our pets will be affected. maybe then “we the people” will take over the government!! I would like to know who is monitoring the corrupt lawmakers and thier sidekicks the dea, cdc, fda and prop just to name a few!?!? How many of them take opiods for painful conditions!? I look forward to the whistleblowers coming forward and exposing these lawmakers for what they are…MURDERERS!!

  2. The messages are ALL too clear-that this is psychological, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual Torture and Terrorism. Every Message is a THREAT, WARNING, and SCREAMS to the world-that the few who feel that “they” can Demand, Command, Complete and TOTAL CONTROL-OVER THE WORLDS HUMANS, ANIMALS, CLIMATE, WATER, and any resource they want, [including the nano-measurements and complete management of another’s personhood, soul, body, personal pain, their animals pain, mental well-being, privacy, exploitation w/o consent, is the most dangerous group of sadists I’ve ever heard. WARNING !!!! WARNING!!!! WAKE-UP CALL, EMERGENCY !!!!! THEY ARE MURDERING OUR MINDS, THOUGHTS, …..ENERGY ROBBERS, ABUSERS. TOTALITARIANISM TOTALITARIANISM MORE PAIN, MORE PAIN, THEY ARE ADDICTED TO SENDING US PAIN, HUNGRY BUT NEVER FULL FROM MAKING EVERYONE SUFFER. SATANIC

  3. This must be an abuse of power. It just doesn’t stop! Leave the poor animals and vets alone, bad enough you can’t stop messing with pain patients. Wake up and realize the problem now is synthetic opioids coming from China and Mexico and put your resources at the least, towards education of that fact. I think even the addicts would be afraid of those drugs once they found out about them. I don’t think anyone wants to die to get high. Leave the suffering people and animals alone and let their doctors decide how best to treat them. Just wait until it is you.

Leave a Reply

Discover more from PHARMACIST STEVE

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading