Increase in Drug Overdose Deaths Leads to State Action Plan
The state is trying to stop a growing drug abuse epidemic with a new plan to monitor powerful prescription painkillers. The Drug and Opioid Abuse Task Force released several recommendations to the Governor on Monday.
The nearly 30 recommendations are aimed at preventing and treating drug abuse. According to the report, in just eight years the number of opiod prescriptions
in Michigan has quadrupled to nearly 750 million.
One of the proposals is increased monitoring of pain killer prescriptions. The task force wants to overhaul the state’s Automated Prescription Service, which tracks painkillers that doctors prescribe.
“It needs to be fixed, it needs to be repaired,” said Michigan Attorney General Bill Scheutte. “Think of it as a search engine that’s decades old and it means it really can’t function in today’s world and it needs to operate 24/7 365 days which it doesn’t today.
Using the database is optional right now but the task force want it to be a requirement for every doctor. That would have track down people who are abusing the system, and let doctors see if a patient has already been prescribed a pain killer by another doctor.
“Sometimes its a small percentage of unscrupulous doctors who operate pill mills and over-prescribe,” Scheutte said. “What it does and it has resulted in this country and in Michigan an epidemic of crisis proportions.”
Dealing with doctors is just the start, the task force is also trying to get medications off the street by expanding drug take-back programs.
Another goal is to help addicts. The task force is proposing removing criminal penalties for reporting an overdose or seeking medical attention for one.
The task force also wants to make Narcan, the emergency drug that can reverse the effects of an overdose, more accessible. It’s proposing letting pharmacists dispense the injection, similar to current EpiPen policies.
Getting true change will take action, something the State Medical Society says it wants to see.
“Governor Snyder has done a great job bringing together the various stakeholders to deal with a difficult issue. Everyone involved has a shared interest in reducing drug overdoses and related deaths. MSMS has been working on this issue for many years and in our experience the key to the success is in getting the recommendations implemented.”
But for people who work with addicts like Mike Hirst, it’s going to take the community’s help to make a true change.
“Everybody has to be working on the same problem from different angles, there’s no magic bullet here,” Hirst said.
But Hirst says tackling the opioid abuse problem with also help the state tackle a growing heroin abuse problem. Hirst’s son, Andrew Hirst, was 24-years-old when he died of a heroin overdose. Hirst says his son’s addiction started with pain killers but ended with heroin, a cheaper and readily accessible option. Working with recovering addicts, Hirst says the majority of additions started with pills.
“They get a tooth pulled and they were prescribed Vicodin or Percocet and they felt great taking that drug,” Hirst said. “That set them on their way and they were searching that drug out after that.”
Filed under: General Problems
Ken…the rule breakers don’t ruin it for the disabled. It’s the people who presume to rule over us that use the rule breakers as a prevarication; the sole raison d’être is to further expand the power of the State and to monetarily reward the private sector cronies who facilitate the expansion. We, as a people, have been conditioned like so much the Pavlovian dog to respond with an almost unquestioning obedience to go along with the implementation of such public policy measures whenever the State trots out one of it’s perfunctory mouthpieces to explain that it’s all about “Public Safety”. The most effective way to combat this disingenuous behavior is to withdraw our consent to be ruled on a point by point basis by saying, “NO!”.
The common addict is the perfect scapegoat in these cases. They are already marginalized. No one in any position of power or influence is going to forcefully advocate for them. The State simply says that it is having to infringe on the law abiding public as a public safety measure because of . It doesn’t matter what the issue is. If we band together and call the State out on it’s BS, it is more apt to cave. There are approximately 550 people inside the Beltway that represent the top of the food chain with respect to the three branches of government. All but nine of them have to participate in a periodically held popularity contest. If they feel their positions face a legitimate threat, they’ll back down.
Addicts will always find a way to abuse whatever. If they don’t have their D.O.C they will use and abuse to excess what ever is available. The problem with updating the “rules’ they will based on my experience INFRINGE on the people that the medication was intended for in the first place! The rule breakers ruin it for the disabled. Thats a shame.