Cleveland Plain Dealer...
Emergency rooms in Ohio agree to tighten up rules on doling out painkillers
By Aaron Marshall  
May 17, 2012 

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Emergency rooms across Ohio will no longer be an easy stop for large supplies of painkillers under new guidelines announced Monday by Gov. John Kasich. 

The Republican governor announced a new policy under which emergency rooms will limit prescriptions for opiates and other painkillers to a 72-hour supply except in rare cases. The new guidelines agreed to by hospitals with emergency rooms across Ohio is aimed at keeping prescription drugs out of the hands of addicts turning to emergency room doctors for prescriptions. 

“This is a really big deal to get emergency rooms to agree that they are going to enter a protocol so that we aren’t going to allow people to go in there and get these prescriptions,” Kasich told reporters after he announced the new policy at a statewide Opiate Summit held in Columbus. 

Kasich has made fighting prescription drug abuse in Ohio a top priority of his first term. In Scioto County, along the Ohio River, a once thriving trade in prescribing painkillers at a handful of pill mills has been shut down by a combination of state agencies and law enforcement largely on Kasich’s watch. 

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