|
Columbus
Dispatch...
Kasich
signs ‘pill mill’ order
Action will speed state’s attack on
prescription-drug abuse
By Alan Johnson
Tuesday,
June 21, 2011
Continuing
the state’s all-out assault
on prescription drug abuse, Gov. John Kasich yesterday signed an
executive
order empowering the State Medical Board to take immediate action
against “pill
mills.”
“Ohio’s
opiate epidemic is a crisis of
unparalleled proportions with devastating, often deadly, consequences,”
Kasich
said in the emergency order, which took effect immediately.
House
Bill 93, legislation which
Kasich signed into law last month, gives the State Medical Board
oversight
regarding the operation of pain-management clinics, physicians who work
there
and the owners and supervisors of clinics. The state has had no
regulatory
oversight of such clinics, although the board can take disciplinary
action
against individual doctors, including suspending their medical licenses.
However,
the board will have to go
through the lengthy process of having the Joint Committee on Agency
Rule
Review, a legislative panel, accept the rules promulgated under the new
law.
Kasich’s
90-day order will catapult
that process forward, allowing the board to begin taking immediate
action. In
the meantime, rules will be processed through committee.
Opiate-based
painkillers were
responsible for nearly 40 percent of the 1,373 drug-overdose deaths in
Ohio in
2009, Kasich’s office said in the order. That fact, coupled with the
Ohio
Prescription Drug Abuse Task Force report issued last October that
underlined
the growing problem with pill mills or pain-management centers,
prompted the
order, the governor said.
The
Kasich administration, Ohio
Attorney General Mike DeWine and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown have all
mounted a
fierce fight on prescription drug abuse, particularly painkillers,
which plague
all of Ohio. The problems are most pronounced in southeastern Ohio.
That’s
why Kasich invited Beth Dunlap,
30, of Portsmouth, a former Oxycontin addict, to Columbus for the
signing of
the law. It enhances the computerized Ohio Automated Rx Review System
to
identify extensive prescription-drug use, limits prescribers’ ability
to
personally furnish drugs, increases oversight of pain clinics and
establishes a
prescription-drug “take-back” program.
Read
it at the Columbus Dispatch
|
