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Yesterday the Greeley Tribune published my article, “Prescription Drug Monitoring Punishes the Responsible for the Sake of the Irresponsible,” written for the Independence Institute. That article begins:
Prescription drug abuse is a serious problem, sometimes a fatal one. But the answer is not for the government to monitor and harass people who suffer from devastating pain — and make it harder for them to manage their pain — in a misguided attempt to save drug abusers from themselves. Unfortunately, that is precisely the effect of House Bill 1283, sponsored by Rep. Beth McCann of Denver.
Here I thought I’d take the opportunity to offer more details about the program and my research of it.
Health Information Designs
One interesting fact about the Colorado database that tracks (some) prescription drug use is that it is operated by a limited-liability corporation, Health Information Designs (HID).
Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) links users directly to HID for information about the Electronic Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP). Interestingly (or perhaps disturbingly), HID originally went into business producing “data mining software” for prescription drugs.
So let us clarify what’s going on here. The Colorado government encourages doctors and pharmacies to enter patients’ personal medical information into a central database, run by a for-profit corporation, and this information is available to a wide range of medical professionals—whether or not patients wish their records to be so distributed—and to law enforcement agents who obtain a warrant to see the records.
One thing McCann wants to do is force all prescribing doctors and pharmacies to register with the database. McCann’s bill would not force prescribing doctors and pharmacies to actually use the register, but does anyone seriously doubt that’s the Drug Enforcement Administration’s eventual aim? The goal here is for Big Brother to be able to monitor every individual’s use of prescription drugs, every doctor’s prescriptions, and every pharmacy’s drug sales. And, of course, the government wants to subject violators of the (ambiguous) prescription laws to penalties, including the penalty of getting locked in a metal cage.
The Funding for the PDMP
Tellingly, the Colorado PDMP, launched in 2005, got its primary funding from the U.S. Department of Justice—of which the DEA is an agency.
The legislator’s fiscal note for 2005 House Bill 1130 states the following:
The bill is assessed at having a conditional fiscal impact of $547,156 . . . in its first year of implementation and $271,484 . . . in its second year of implementation. . . . During the current fiscal year, the Department of Regulatory Agencies has received a $50,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant in support of the Harold Rogers Prescription Drug Monitoring Program. . . . Additionally, the federal government will make a $350,000 grant available to implement the program once statutorily authorized.
I do not have complete funding details about the program. However, it is apparent that the program is driven primarily by federal law enforcement.
News Sources
I relied on several news reports in conducting my research. 9News published a story about McCann’s current bill. Eli Stokol’s pathetic excuse for journalism on this matter essentially uncritically relates McCann’s talking points, without bothering to raise a single critical question. Hopefully in the future Stokol will take his role as a journalist more seriously and set a higher bar for himself than legislative lapdog.
Over at the Denver Post, I found Felisa Cardona’s 2011 story about the legislature’s renewal of the PDMP that year as well as Michael Booth’s 2012 story about DEA complains of low registry use.
Drug Substitution
As I point out in my op-ed, drug abusers who have a harder time getting one type of drug often switch to another type. My claim is supported by a recent news story from the Washington Post (republished by the Denver Post).
[T]he U.S. government’s decade-long crackdown on abuse of prescription drugs has run an unsettling risk: that arresting doctors and shuttering “pill mills” would inadvertently fuel a new epidemic of heroin use. . . . [A]t the same time that some pain medications have become less available on the street and pricier, many users have switched to cheaper heroin, since prescription pills and heroin are in the same class of drugs and provide a comparable euphoric high.
It should go without saying—but, in today’s political climate not even the most obvious facts may go without saying—that substituting street heroin addictions and deaths for prescription drug addictions and deaths is no great victory.
Drug Thefts
I cut the following line from my op-ed due to space restraints, but it’s an interesting detail: “In testifying in favor of McCann’s bill, Robert Valuck from the University of Colorado offered the example of a woman who robbed a pharmacy at gunpoint—but the expanded registry would promote rather than deter thefts of prescription drugs.” Valuck’s claim is included in 9News’s video, not in Stokol’s written account.
The Magnitude of Prescription Drug Deaths
In my op-ed, I claim that McCann apparently overstated the magnitude of deaths related to prescription drugs. Specifically, she said, ““More people actually die from prescription drug overdose than from traffic accidents.”
I have an email out to McCann asking for her sources, so perhaps she’ll send me something I have not yet considered. However, based on the sources I’ve been able to find so far, McCann’s claim seems not to have support.
This past October, an outfit called Trust for America’s Health published a report, “Prescription Drug Abuse: Strategies to Stop the Epidemic.” (Likening a volitional behavior—drug abuse—to an infectious disease is epistemologically and morally offensive, but I’ll leave that topic for another day.)
That report does not state that prescription drugs are responsible for more deaths than are traffic accidents. Instead, the report claims that “[p]rescription painkillers are responsible for more than 16,000 deaths” per year. The number of motor vehicle deaths exceed 30,000 each year.
Regarding traffic fatalities, the report makes a different claim: “Drug poisoning deaths—the majority of which are related to prescription drugs—surpassed traffic-related crashes as the leading cause of injury death in the United States in 2009.”
My guess is that McCann misstated this report’s (or a derivative report’s) findings.
(I also saw that Dr. Joseph Mercola makes a broad statement about prescription drug deaths surpassing auto deaths, but, if you trace back his links, you find that the statistic pertains only to Ohio. I have not traced the claim beyond a 2011 New York Times story.)
The best statistics I’ve found about the problem of prescription drug abuse are provided by the Centers for Disease Control, which report, “In 2008, drug overdoses in the United States caused 36,450 deaths. OPR [opioid pain relievers] were involved in 14,800 deaths (73.8%) of the 20,044 prescription drug overdose deaths.” (In many cases a death involves the mixing of various types of drugs.)
Of course, as the CDC also report, most people who intentionally kill themselves by overdosing on drugs use prescription drugs for the purpose. But the monitoring program will not pick up one-time drug purchases among suicidal people, nor will it prevent suicidal people from substituting one method of suicide for another.
Conclusions
I have known people who have died from terminal cancer. I know people now dealing with the agonizing pain caused by late-stage cancer and other diseases. The simple fact is that more people with serious injuries and diseases will suffer more pain because of the government’s crackdown on prescription drugs—all to save irresponsible drug abusers from their own poor choices. That policy is morally wrong.
Image of Beth McCann: Wikimedia Commons