CONCERNS THREATEN GRANT TO HELP TRACK DRUGS

Proponents are trying to revive the legislation so that Iowa won't lose a
$350,000 grant for a system to track prescriptions

Physicians' concerns about the creation of a statewide prescription
drug-monitoring program have jeopardized a $350,000 federal grant intended
to help get the program up and running in pharmacies statewide.

Members of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack's staff were planning to meet soon with
members of the Iowa and Polk County medical societies in hopes of
resuscitating legislation that would create the database to track the
illegal use of prescription drugs statewide.

After passing in the House 98-0, the legislation stalled in a Senate
committee after physicians raised concerns about patient privacy, ongoing
costs and who would have access to the information.

"We sat down with the Board of Pharmacy last week and told them our
concerns," said Dr. Thomas Becker, president of the Polk County Medical
Society. "We weren't asked to fix the bill."

Lloyd Jessen, the head of the pharmacy board, said the new concerns make it
unlikely the database legislation can move forward this year. If the
project is postponed until next year, the pharmacy board would have to
return all of the $350,000 the state received from the Department of
Justice to establish the database.

The setback has aggravated supporters of Iowa's new law restricting sales
of pseudoephedrine.

On Monday, the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy urged Iowa law
enforcement representatives to contact legislators to revive House File 722
, so that the database could one day be used to track excessive pharmacy
sales of pseudoephedrine to clamp down on meth-making.

The new anti-meth law passed this year requires that Iowans go to
pharmacies and show identification to purchase nearly all cold and allergy
medicines made with pseudoephedrine.

"The problem with the new meth law is that you can go from pharmacy to
pharmacy and buy the legal limit, and there's no way to monitor that,"
Jessen said.

However, Jessen said the existing federal grant would not have covered the
cost of adding pseudoephedrine tracking to the proposed database. So far,
nearly half of all states have established electronic systems capable of
tracking an array of drugs that are prone to abuse.

State Sen. Jack Hatch, the Democratic co-chairman of a subcommittee working
on the database bill, said legislators could still revive the legislation
this year if the physicians' concerns were better addressed.

"Do I think this is worthwhile? Yes," he said. "But I still have questions.
And in our haste to go after these guys on methamphetamine, we're not going
to make mistakes."