Drug czar’s odd prescription
Published 12:01 am Thursday, April 21, 2011
Is White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske giving anyone a headache?
On Tuesday, he announced that in order to stop prescription drug abuse, Congress must require special training for doctors before they are allowed to prescribe powerful drugs such as OxyContin.
Wow. And some people thought it was the new health care law that was going to put the government in the examining room with you and your doctor.
Kerlikowske correctly noted that painkillers are the nation’s deadliest drug-abuse problem. They kill more people than heroin, cocaine and meth combined. That’s why many doctors, health care professionals and states are working on the problem, and have been for some time. In fact, here in Washington, police attribute a rise in heroin use to the crackdown on pain medication prescriptions.
Rather than blanket requirements, the feds could target obvious problems, such as Florida. Turns out that’s where 85 percent of all Oxycodone pills in the nation are prescribed. Apparently people take buses to Florida to get pills in phenomenon dubbed the “OxyContin Express,” the Associated Press reported.
Florida has a preponderance of cash-only “pain clinics” that dispense hundreds of pills per patient based on questionable diagnoses — or none at all, AP reported. So Florida needs to shut down illegal pain clinics. The fact is, patients with legitimate prescriptions are just as likely to become addicted, or accidently overdose.
Kerlikowske, the former Seattle police chief, may or may not be aware that Washington has the nation’s toughest regulations regarding pain medicine prescriptions. It’s so strict critics worried that patients may not get the medication they need.
The 2010 law requires doctors to refer patients (except cancer patients) who are using more prescription drugs and aren’t improving to a pain management specialist for other treatment options. The specialist, for instance, could recommend physical therapy. Critics say there won’t be enough pain specialists. But you don’t need to be a pain specialist to refer a patient to a physical therapist; that would seem the proper role of the doctor who prescribed the medication in the first place.
Meanwhile, Kerlikowske says the “jury is still out” regarding medical cannabis, a non-narcotic painkiller. When discussing Florida’s problem, he said that painkillers are now second to marijuana in drug abuse among Floridians.
We’d like to require special training for the drug czar, and those like him, who cannot see, or refuse to acknowledge, the difference between opiate medicines that are the deadliest drug problem in the nation, and a non-addictive alternative, which can effectively help patients manage pain, without a chance of killing them.
