DRUG TRACKING BILL SURVIVES, OTHERS GET FRIED

A system to detect abusers of prescription drugs makes the
cut.

Catfish and sex offenders had something in common Thursday in the Iowa
Legislature -- bills on both went belly-up.

In the House, lawmakers cast aside a resolution designating the
channel catfish as the state fish of Iowa. They also threw overboard a
proposed law setting minimum 25-year prison sentences for certain
first-time child sex offenders.

Supporters of the anti-crime bill, approved by the Senate despite
criticism from county prosecutors, expect it to be revived in some
form as lawmakers continue to work on sex offender issues.

Legislation capping interest rates on car title loans also failed to
clear a committee deadline for reducing the Legislature's workload
going into the final weeks of the 2006 session.

But a bill that had been left for dead this week regarding a
computerized system to help detect abusers of prescription drugs was
spared at the last minute.

The Senate Human Resources Committee, in amending House File 722,
voted to limit access to the proposed prescription drug database to
pharmacists and doctors -- not law officers or medical boards, unless
they obtained a court order.

To remain eligible for debate, virtually all bills except those
dealing with taxes or spending needed the support of the House or
Senate and a committee in the opposite chamber by the end of Thursday.

"This is a crazy week, and we're all at our wits' end," said Sen.
Herman Quirmbach, an Ames Democrat.

The biggest turnaround came on the bill directing Iowa pharmacies to
report all prescriptions for narcotic painkillers and other addictive
drugs to a central database.

The prescription-drug monitoring program is aimed at curbing
"doctor-shopping," whereby addicts get multiple doctors to write
prescriptions for the same drugs.

The House-passed bill had bogged down in the Senate because of privacy
concerns and was declared dead on Wednesday.

The legislation received a new lease on life when the Human Resources
Committee approved a version Thursday that bans law officers from
looking at the registry unless they obtain a court order to
investigate a specific person.

The same limit would be placed on state regulators who oversee doctors
and pharmacists, said Sen. Jack Hatch, a Des Moines Democrat.
Researchers would be banned from using the registry, even if
information identifying patients were removed.

Dale Woolery, a spokesman for the Governor's Office of Drug Control
Policy, called the revised proposal "an attempt to prevent fishing
expeditions."

Woolery said the main intent of the tracking system always has been to
help health-care experts identify patients who might have addiction
problems. Police still could use the computerized system if they could
convince a judge that they have a valid reason.

"It doesn't change the standard by which law enforcement is supposed
to be operating today," Woolery said. "We hope this will be a time
saver, and maybe a lifesaver."

The changes made the legislation more palatable to the American Civil
Liberties Union of Iowa. "Now it focuses on patient health care, which
it should have all along," said lobbyist Marty Ryan.

Twenty-one states have prescription monitoring programs.

On the crime front, the Legislature has passed a number of laws
cracking down on sex offenders since last year, when a 10-year-old
Cedar Rapids girl was abducted, sexually assaulted and killed.

The anti-crime push took a detour Thursday when the House Public
Safety Committee didn't act on a Senate-passed bill setting mandatory
minimum prison terms of 25 years for three sex crimes where the
victims are children younger than 13.

Senate File 2094 also would have let judges impose life terms without
parole for offenders convicted of lascivious acts with a child, sexual
exploitation of a minor or second-degree sex abuse.

While the bill was allowed to die, Republican and Democratic leaders
of the House committee said the issue will receive more debate. They
said they want to address county prosecutors' objections to the
proposed prison terms before moving ahead with sex offender
legislation that also fixes problems with a law barring certain
offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or child care center.

"If the history of the Legislature has shown us anything, it is that
once a tough sex offender bill begins to move through the process, it
becomes very difficult to slow this process down so that meaningful
dialogue can occur," Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a Des Moines Democrat, and
Rep. Clel Baudler, a Republican from Greenfield, said in a joint statement.