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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

 





 
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