Pubdate: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 Source: Roanoke Times (VA) Copyright: 2004 Roanoke Times Contact: http://www.roanoke.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/368 Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?136 (Methadone) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/oxycontin.htm (Oxycontin/Oxycodone) AN INFORMATION WAR ON DRUGS Virginia needs its pilot prescription-monitoring program not only to continue, but to expand beyond its current limited reach. Since Virginia started a pilot prescription-monitoring program in Southwest Virginia about a year ago, the region's wave of drug addiction and related crime has not subsided. That is not an argument for ending the program, but for expanding it. The General Assembly should make the pilot project permanent - right after reluctant lawmakers take the steps needed to make it fully effective. For starters, they should include all of Virginia in the program, as it was originally conceived. And they should support a national group's push to get states to share their data. The monitoring program is a database of information pharmacists must enter when they fill prescriptions for addictive medicines: the patients who get the drugs, the doctors who prescribe them. The Department of Health Professions is the gatekeeper. Access to the information is strictly limited, as it should be, to protect the privacy of people who have a legitimate need for the drugs and use them as prescribed. Those few professionals who do have access have a legitimate need, also - to know when prescriptions are being abused. Doctors, for instance, should know what prescriptions for powerful painkillers their patients might have received from other doctors before writing their own. Law enforcement officials say doctor-shopping is the most common way legal, controlled drugs such as OxyContin and methadone enter the black market. In rural Southwest Virginia, where abuse of both is epidemic, addicts or pushers can easily skirt the prescription-monitoring system. Doctors in West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee are a short drive away. And, of course, drug abusers can always go to Virginia doctors and pharmacies outside of Health Planning Region III - the pilot program area - to fill their illicit prescription needs. People in Radford, say, can go to Montgomery County; those in Bedford County can cross the line into Roanoke County. Still, doctors and police who have used the database to discover doctor-shoppers have shown how effective it can be. The General Assembly authorized the two-year pilot in 2002, when a plague of OxyContin abuse in Appalachia was stunning news. Unless legislators extend the program next year, it will expire. Drug-related deaths in the western district of Virginia last year totaled 223, up from 101 in 2000. Lawmakers should keep the database - and expand it. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek