Prescription drug abuse nowsecond leading cause of
accidental deaths

By Misti Drew
Tribune-Courier Reporter
mdrew@tribunecourier.com

MARSHALL COUNTY – Every day in the United States, 2,500 children, ages 12-17, abuse a prescription painkiller for the first time. Today, it could be your child.

It’s a thought Pennyrile Narcotics Detective Kevin Mighell says parents had better consider.

“Parents should treat their medicine cabinets like a loaded gun,” Mighell said. “You hear all of this concern over putting gun locks on guns, but you should treat your medicine cabinets the same way.”

Drug abuse has already wreaked havoc in the lives of dozens of Marshall County families.

“More than 75 percent of the accidental deaths, homicides and suicides in Marshall County can be directly linked to drug and alcohol abuse,” says County Coroner Mitchell Lee. “And that number is continually growing.”

While Lee said he has seen drug-specific overdoses, it’s the growing trend to create fatal mixtures of prescription and illegal drugs that is of grave concern.

And with prescription drug use at an all time high in America, attempting to solve the problem on a local level seems to have been handed over to legislators.

Kentucky Congressman Ed Whitfield has been a long time proponent of proactive drug enforcement measures.

Whitfield not only introduced the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act (NASPER) legislation in 2000, but he also recently lobbied Congress for an additional $2 million in funding to functionally implement the program.

NASPER is a nationwide, computerized database system capable of tracking controlled substance prescriptions via state databases.

The intent of the original legislation was to fight the trafficking of legal prescription drugs in the black-market. It was also aimed at eliminating “doctor shopping.”

NASPER is set to change the way state data based systems communicate, allowing any physician or other authorized agent anywhere in the U.S. to obtain the prescription history of a particular patient.

“The abuse of prescription drugs continues to be a problem that plagues millions of Americans and their families every day,” Whitfield said.

“NASPER is a powerful weapon in the fight against prescription drug abuse that will allow physicians to detect abuse and prevent the practice of doctor shopping across state lines. I am pleased that NASPER has, at long last, received the funding that it needs to be implemented and start saving lives.”

On a state level, Kentucky is one of only 20 states to have created a prescription drug tracking program.

Known as KASPER, physicians, law enforcement officers and officials in the criminal justice system have quick access to any Kentucky patient’s prescription medication history.

A KASPER report not only shows prescription history, it also identifies the practitioner who prescribed the medication, and the pharmaceutical agent who dispensed it.

Because of the success of KASPER, states such as Tennessee, who do not have a prescription tracking program in place, have seen a marked increase in the level of controlled substance prescriptions dispensed.

But despite the programs in place, Marshall County still ranks in the third highest group of counties for numbers of prescriptions received, per-capita. The county ranks in the second-highest category for prescription drug usage increases.

But the battle to bring awareness to the youth seems to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

The number of 12 to 17 year-olds abusing prescription medications has increased more than 212 percent in recent years and that number continues to increase every time the medicine cabinet opens.