Willmar Lawmaker Using Son’s Overdose to Spur Change in Prescription Monitoring Laws
Joe Augustine
Wed, 2 Mar 2016 18:27:43 CST
A Minnesota lawmaker whose son became addicted to powerful pain medication before dying from a heroin overdose wants to strengthen the state’s oversight of opioid prescriptions.
Rep. Dave Baker (R-Willmar) will introduce legislation this month that would give state regulators more access to the state’s prescription monitoring program, which was implemented in 2010 to identify doctor shoppers and thieving doctors.
A 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS investigation found state privacy laws prevent the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy, which operates the monitoring program, from sharing crucial prescription evidence with law enforcement and other state regulators during investigations.
“It just has to be managed better than it ever has before because too many people are dying,” said Baker, whose oldest son, Daniel, became addicted to opioids in college and died of a heroin overdose in 2011.
The first-term lawmaker started drafting legislation to improve the monitoring program soon after taking office in 2014.
“It has to evolve with the needs and the actual crisis we’re in now,” Baker said. “It’s too late for our family.”
Baker’s law would allow regulatory boards, like the Board of Medical Practice, to access the monitoring program when investigating doctors or medical professionals suspected of stealing medication.
“We have no access at this point and time,” Board of Medical Practice Executive Director Dr. Ruth Martinez said.
5 EYEWITNESS NEWS found 268 medical professionals in Minnesota have been suspended for stealing medication since 2010.
An emergency room doctor from Princeton, Minnesota, stole pain pills for two years.
“I would write prescriptions to another party, they would fill the prescriptions and we would split them,” Dr. Luther Philaya said.
Philaya says state regulators never flagged his prescribing habits because nobody looked him up in the monitoring program.
Baker, who will also consider legislation that would give law enforcement more access to the monitoring program in the future, says patient privacy must be protected but that sitting on valuable information does not help address the public health crisis.
“There’s no reason why we can’t have this information at the fingertips,” Baker said.
Filed under: General Problems
The history of Socialism in America, is that wealthy elitists endorsed it, as a means of circumventing the Fourth Amendment.
The law says that we the people must be secure from the government in our persons, property, papers, and effects.
Wealthy plutocrats, seeking to prevent trade unions from discovering how to teach their members to use capitalism themselves, promote a kind of socialistic commons, where nobody fully owned anything, and OUR individual and separate persons, property, places, and effects, became a blurry “commons” shared by everybody..with the powerful simply having a louder voice in who got how big a share of things. In that “commons”, there was a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, that in practice, meant we had the degree of privacy that the ruling class thought reasonable to allow us.
Basically, it’s George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but the pigs are “more equal” than everyone else.
The problem this plutocracy faces, is precisely the problem Goering and Goebbels and Himmler and Heydrich faced at Nuremberg…they never actually repealed the pre-existing laws! A group of Allied military officers, who in civilian life had practiced law, and who spoke German, read the German law books, found out what laws were in force from 1937-1945 in Germany, and applied those laws to the captured former rulers of Nazi Germany. At trial they proved the fools guilty of like 11 million counts of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and premeditated murder (what we call the Holocaust), and sentenced them to punishments allowed under German law, which the defendants, as German public officials, were expected to know and obey. Seven Nazi leaders had a neck-tie party, Herr Goering skipped it by hiding cyanide in his jail cell and dying a few hours early…and several others served life sentences at Spandaufestung in Berlin. (A recently-declassified FBI file reveals that Hitler himself was in hiding in Argentina for many years. Director Hoover confirmed it was him. Presumably, had Goering been able to win acquittal at trial, Hitler would have emerged from hiding, as well.
Imagine the shock waves emanating from the US Supreme Court, in several recent Fourth Amendment rulings that treated personal property as something inherently personal and not shared…and began throwing the “reasonable expectation of privacy” concept out the window, replacing it with an absolute requirement that law officers either get a warrant or stop searching.
More to the point, on drugs policy, if the law requires every person to be the owner of his or her own body, then it’s awfully difficult to impose restrictions on drug use at all. Unless a person is present in a common area (such as a highway, waterway, government building, or park), his or her personal drug use is entirely up to him or her, and the owner of the land on which the use is taking place. This alone would put a huge dent in the Drug War…because Scientologists and other folks who object on religious grounds to various kinds of drug use, are free to buy land and prohibit any visitors from bringing drugs on their land…but have no standing at all, to say what I may invite my friend to do on my land.
Eliminating the mandate that all property be shared, eliminates the very worst forms of intolerance. The fool who cannot abide by the differences of others, is free to hide from them on his own turf, but cannot stop me from tolerating people whom I choose to tolerate or befriend.
As Alabama officials learned from Rosa Parks, they were free to pretend they didn’t lose the Civil War, and they were free to imagine that she was their servant and not a fellow citizen…but when they demanded that she pretend to be a servant, by walking to the back of the bus, they simply had no business interfering with her person and her effects. She had as much right to feel tired, as anybody else.
Steve, we always here these stories about young people who became addicted to opioids and then heroin. They never give the circumstances of why the victims took opiates to begin with so we can only speculate on the reason. The article stated that he became addicted while in college and for those of us who spent time in school know for a fact that partying is a minor degree. Alcohol and illicit drugs are part of the curriculum and a lot of students love this course. But this law maker and many others don’t seem interested in finding out how students get the drugs, all they care about is stopping it at the source.
Does anyone know what the statistics are on young people who try drugs for the first time, high school compared to college? I’ll bet that a huge percentage of college students will say that they never tried anything stronger than Marijuana and or alcohol before they got to college. But God help us if we use our higher education campuses as an incubator for drug abuse.