A new report reveals that Florida's new tougher drug policies might be connected to a decline in opioid painkiller prescriptions by the state's top prescribers. The data reveals that a year after the policies were implemented, significantly fewer prescriptions were written.
In late 2011, two policies intended to reduce potentially addictive opioids were implemented in Florida, one of which was the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP). This database tracks individual prescriptions and monitors patients names, dates and dosages prescribed, allowing doctors to keep note of patients with multiple prescriptions from multiple doctors, a sign of addiction.
The second policy was a "pill mill" law that now requires pain clinics to register with the state and be owned by a doctor in order to combat pill mills that prescribe high levels of opioid prescriptions compared to other drugs.
Just one year after these two new policies were implemented, opioid prescriptions by Florida's top prescribers dropped six percent, leading to a total decrease in volume of 13.5 percent within this same group.
In addition, the number of patients among this group of doctors - who make up approximately four percent of opioid prescribers in the state but a whopping 40 percent of opioid prescriptions - dropped by five percent.
In regards to the remaining 96 percent of opioid doctors, prescriptions of the drugs declined by just 0.7 percent after the introduction of the new policies.
"Our findings indicate how state policies such as PDMPs may reduce opioid use among the highest prescribers," said Hsien-Yen Chang of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of the study. "But our report also shows that programs like PDMPs must be complemented by many other measures to combat the epidemic of addiction and non-medical opioid use."
"At some point, checking the prescription database before prescribing an opioid should be just as routine as doing a kidney test before starting a new blood pressure treatment," said G. Caleb Alexander, also of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior author of the study.
"I think we'll get to that point; we'll see prescription databases used like these other tools and have an even greater impact," he added.
The findings were published in the June 2 issue of the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
