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Utah Lawmakers Seek to Address Prescription Drug Abuse
Utah lawmakers have responded to what some are calling a crisis in prescription drug abuse with legislation aimed at curbing the threat, HB 28 and HB 35.
April 04, 2010 /Pharmaceutical PR News/ -- Utah Lawmakers Seek to Address Prescription Drug Abuse
The Utah Department of Health recently reported alarming statistics showing that Utahns are being poisoned at twice the national rate. Many of those deaths involve prescription drug overdoses, which soared 500 percent between 1999 and 2007. The Utah Department of Health reported in 2007 that the rate of prescription drug overdose deaths is more than twice that of deaths attributed to use of street drugs. More Utahns died of drug overdoses than from car crashes, according to the Department of Public Health.
Utah lawmakers responded to what some are calling a crisis in drug abuse with legislation aimed to curb the threat. HB 28 and HB 35 would create roadblocks to intentional prescription drug misuse through reporting and tracking mechanisms for prescription drugs.
HB 28 would improve Utah's prescription drug-tracking mechanisms, attacking the practice of doctor shopping for painkillers by addicts. While the bill calls for studies to determine causes of and solutions for opiate addiction, it also contains provisions potentially troublesome to privacy rights advocates. Under HB 28, each time a patient fills any prescription for any controlled substance, the pharmacist would be required to enter into a statewide database extensive detail on the patient, prescription and prescribing doctor. The pharmacist would also be required to verify the patient's identity and submit the proof of identity to the state database.
While the bill may capture information relevant to doctor-shoppers and pill-pushers, it captures much more, and for this, it may run afoul of constitutional guarantees. Rather than targeting opiates, the legislation creating a statewide database will require reporting on all "controlled substances," rather than just opiates. The state will be able access information on residents that take medication for STDs as well as residents that take psychiatric medications, neither of which may actually contain opiates, or serve the purpose of reducing painkiller overdoses.
Utah already operates a voluntary prescription database for physicians, according to RDMag, but only 20 percent of the state's doctors are registered; of the 20 percent, half actually use the database.
HB 35 is a bill that requires hospitals to report any admission involving overdose or poisoning from prescription drugs in a patient 12 years or older to the Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing. The DOPL, in turn, tracks the prescription and makes a report to the prescribing physician. While there's also a Big Brother quality to requiring hospital intervention in the doctor-patient relationship, the proposed law does seem to serve a reasonable state interest in alerting doctors to overdoses occurring as a result of prescriptions they wrote, enabling them to improve patient communication or treat addiction if needed.
Both bills await action by Utah Governor Gary Herbert.
Article provided by Stone & Law
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