War on prescription drug abuse has a need for speed

Column

The number leaping from the page whenever the topic turns to prescription drug addiction is seven. Seven is the number of Floridians who suffer prescription-drug-related deaths each day. Seven also is the number of days, under the latest "pill-mill" statute, between reports pharmacies have to make to the state's new database.

Shrink one, says Pasco County Commissioner Jack Mariano, and you will limit the other. Sold on that point, the board will urge the county's legislative delegation to push more stringent reporting deadlines when state lawmakers convene Monday afternoon at River Ridge High School.

Mariano evokes the old "Six Million Dollar Man" introduction in his sales pitch. Existing pill-mill statutes are a good start, he says. But we have the technology. We can make it better. And we should.

If cutting down on interstate trafficking is among the goals, spacing reports seven days apart is a joke, he says. "Someone could drive down from Kentucky, go to pharmacy after pharmacy loading up on oxycodone," Mariano says, "and be back in Kentucky before anyone here had a clue."

The seven-day gap is the proverbial hole through which you could drive a truck. Thinking of another pertinent figure — 23, the number of new drug-enforcement personnel recently approved by the board for the Pasco County Sheriff's Office — Mariano wants the state to match the county's seriousness. "Let's have them make reporting instantaneous," he says.

Well, why not? Banks don't wait seven days to report robberies. Contractors don't wait seven days to report stolen copper tubing. Homeowners don't wait seven days to report burglaries. I mean, prescription drug crime is epidemic, draining public resources, but we're going seven days between feeding the state's database? And we call it a crackdown?

But an every-seven-days minimum does not exclude even more aggressive reporting, up to and including real-time — that is, instantaneous — downloads. The problem, say those familiar with the evolution of the project, is cost.

This would be less of a difficulty for the big guys, the ones on every street corner or in your favorite grocery or retail discounter. Most of them already require at least a daily data dump from their hundreds of outposts. As for the cost of writing a few extra lines of software to accommodate the state, they'd have economies of scale — a single expense spread across their corporate universes — working for them.

Neither of these mitigating factors applies satisfactorily to Florida's (mostly legitimate) independent pharmacies, mom and pop shops that, according to the group's state association, number about 1,300.

We say "mostly legitimate" advisedly. In the first six months of this year, Florida accounted for half the nation's applications for independent pharmacy applications — 217 — according to the Drug Enforcement Agency. The surge coincided with the state's ban on physician-dispensing of the usual-suspect drugs.

We will see soon enough just how serious we are. Gov. Rick Scott resisted this year's bill, chaperoned by Sen. Mike Fasano (New Port Richey) and championed by newly minted state Attorney General Pam Bondi, until the eleventh hour. (They're all Republicans, feeding the notion of GOP dysfunction.)

Even when he acquiesced, Scott waved off any state money going into the database operation. Now some punk county commissioner from Hudson wants instantaneous reporting? All Fasano is hoping for is a tweak: Consulting the database before they write prescriptions is voluntary for doctors now; he'd like to make it mandatory.

Enforcement would be complicated, he concedes, but the alternative is to abandon a potentially useful legal weapon, and law enforcement needs every one of them.

Every weapon. Yes. That's exactly what Mariano is thinking.