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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Several Missouri counties have taken opioid matters into their own hands [ap.org]:

Fed up that Missouri is the only state that doesn't track the prescription and sale of opioids, some of its biggest cities and counties have created their own monitoring system to help combat the increasingly popular and highly addictive drugs.

Forty-nine states have established prescription drug monitoring programs, or PDMPs, which require pharmacies to report controlled substances dispensed to an electronic database. Advocates say monitoring helps stop "pill shopping" by people who seek multiple prescriptions from several doctors, either to feed their own addictions or to re-sell the drugs. They also can flag physicians who might be overprescribing such drugs. Although the Missouri Legislature had considered adopting a drug monitoring program several times, it has always opted against doing so, largely over privacy concerns, including the potential for health records to be hacked.

Leaders of St. Louis County, the city of St. Louis, Jackson County, St. Charles County and a few non-urban counties have banded together to start their own monitoring program, which is scheduled to go online next month. Though the consortium includes only a small percentage of Missouri's 115 counties, it covers nearly 2.5 million of the state's 6 million residents.

[...] There were more than 33,000 deaths related to heroin or prescription opioids in the U.S. in 2015, including 1,066 in Missouri, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which considers it a public health crisis. The CDC says prescription drug monitoring programs have succeeded at their goals: Florida had more than 50 percent fewer oxycodone overdose deaths in 2012 after its program began and New York State saw a 75 percent drop in patients visiting multiple prescribers for the same drug in 2013, a year after its program was established.

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