Closing Down the Prescription Drug Pipeline

Good news from our Attorney General Jack Conway in a story from January 20, 2012. He and the Attorney General of Florida both announced that they are seeing a decrease in illegal pill trafficking going from there to here. Both states have increased the enforcement of laws pertaining to drug trafficking, and Florida has added new rules and programs as well.

Vans loaded up with people were regularly traveling down to Florida from Kentucky to buy pain pills at the storefront clinics. They always paid with cash and had no difficulty getting the pills after either a brief examination by a doctor, or in some cases, no examination at all! Conway estimates that 60 percent of the illegal prescription drugs that have been sold in Kentucky on the black market came from Florida, many of them in this manner.

Conway said that the new bill being introduced next week would require health care providers to register with Kentucky’s prescription monitoring system. Emergency rooms will also need to get a report from the system before they can dispense the medications that are on the list of frequently re-sold pills. By looking at this system, they will know whether or not the “patients” have received prescriptions for these items from other doctors recently.

Down in Florida, Governor Rick Scott signed a bill into law during summer 2011 that authorized the creation of a database that monitors prescription drugs. This is intended to reduce doctor-shopping and also stop people from flooding into Florida to get their stock of illegal prescription drugs to sell up the eastern coast, over into our state, and many other places as well. New penalties were levied against doctors who would overprescribe, and new rules were set on pharmacies as well.

And the good news is that it is making a difference! Pam Bondi, the Florida Attorney General, said that just two years ago, 98 of the top 100 U.S. prescribers of oxycodone were in Florida. Now there are only 11. Also, the number of registered pain clinics in Florida dropped from 943 to 579, cutting the access to a much lower percentage.