St. Louis City joins St. Louis County in establishing its own opiate drug monitoring program. They join the rest of the nation with operations to reduce opiate prescription abuse, addiction and overdose deaths, unlike the Show Me State.
St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay signed into law Board Bill 36 on Tuesday May 31, at the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse office. Slay was joined by City of St. Louis Department of Health Director Melba Moore, city and state elected leaders and advocates for prescription drug monitoring.
Moore said this law is true prevention that will save lives.
“Both St. Louis County and St. Louis City are taking the lead on monitoring prescriptions of painkillers and tracking patients who overuse or abuse drugs, and this is going to save lives,” Moore explained. “The passage of this legislation gives medical professionals a powerful tool for reducing the abuse, addiction and diversion of opioid painkillers and other prescription drugs.”
St. Louis County’s drug monitoring program was signed into law in March of this year. The city and the county will work together to develop a comprehensive regional database to alert pharmacists and doctors of individuals trying to obtain or fill prescriptions of opioid drugs from multiple locations.
Moore said that other Missouri counties may soon follow suit.
“There have been discussions about this in St. Charles County and Jefferson County. I believe that it’s just a matter of time that they will also pass their legislation as well,” Moore said. “We have strong momentum on this, so we are strengthening the program that is already underway in the county and it’s one step closer to a regional program.”
Harold Weissman, executive director of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, said this is a step in a positive direction for the St. Louis region.
“St. Louis City and the County, being the two regions in the state of Missouri, beginning to address the prescription opioid problem as a public health crisis, and to take those steps that all other 49 states, Puerto Rico and Guam have already taken,” Weissman told The American. The District of Columbia also has a PDMP.
Keeping track of the sale of such medications serves as an early warning system for intervention and alerts prescribers of “doctor shopping” for multiple prescriptions to access the addictive drugs for resale.
Chad Sabora, founder of Missouri Network for Opiate Reform and Advocacy, said the computers of physicians and pharmacists will be able to talk to each other to prevent doctor shopping.
“People go in to see different doctors for the same prescription and have them filled at different pharmacies,” Sabora said. “Now in Missouri, there is no way to prevent that, so people are taking advantage of that by bringing multiple prescriptions from other states to Missouri to fill them and put them on the black market.”
While these strong painkillers are needed for serious illnesses – cancer treatment, sickle cell disease and following surgery, for example, opioid prescription abuse is of epidemic proportions in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it is a leading cause of accidental deaths.
“As we go after the overprescribing of opiate pain medications, we have to be aware that there are chronic pain patients out there that need these drugs in order to survive,” Sabora added. “We cannot use the type of offense strategy that is going to limit their ability to get medications they rightfully need.”
“No one wants to deprive a person who is suffering from a painful condition the drug that will provide them release; we want only to recognize that, because these drugs are so addictive, they can be easily misused and they can be easily diverted,” Weissman said. “And we want these drugs to be used responsibly and prescribed responsibly and the way to do that is to give doctors and pharmacists the means to determine that they patient is taking the proper amount of medication.”
While there is a federal drug monitoring program, repeatedly, the Missouri legislature has repeatedly failed to enact a statewide PDMP database.
“What the statewide databases do is track the number and type of prescriptions filled to individual patients, while federal databases can track the total number of pills that are being held in pharmacies,” explained Weissman. “It is the state databases that can track which patients they are going to and which doctors are prescribing them.”
A concern about patient privacy was a focal point of state opposition and a threatened filibuster – although access would go to health professionals who already have access to medical information.
“We allow them to have access to our health records when we go to the doctor or when we get a prescription filled at the pharmacy,” Weissman said.
“If you’ve ever gotten a prescription filled at a national chain, like Walgreens, Walmart, CVS … the information is already there, we just need to create a system where Missouri pharmacies can talk to each other,” Sabora said. “Words like privacy and things like that are buzzwords for politicians to further their cause, but if you actually truly investigate how this actually implements, it won’t be really interrupting anybody’s privacy.”
