TARGET ABUSE, NOT DRUGS

Good Sense About Combating Prescription Drug Abuse Prevailed In Washington
And Frankfort Last Week

In Washington, an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration
rejected the bad idea of restricting the legitimate use of and access to
the highly effective narcotic painkiller OxyContin in order to combat its
abuse.

Eastern Kentucky's U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers had been among those pushing the
blunderbuss approach the panel rejected - proposals to forbid family
physicians and other nonspecialists from prescribing OxyContin and to bar
physicians from using it in any but the most severe cases of pain.

The panel clearly identified the problem in both proposals: In order to
fight the terrible abuse occurring in places like Mr. Rogers' district,
almost all of rural America, which lacks pain specialists, would be denied
the benefits of the drug, along with all the patients with moderate pain
now using it successfully.

A far better and more accurately targeted approach to improving prescribing
practices is the alternative the FDA is now considering. It would require
doctors to get special training in painkillers every three years in order
to renew their registration for prescribing controlled narcotics.

But it's still up to states to ensure the legality and competence of those
doctors' practices. That's why the good sense shown last week by Kentucky's
drug abuse task force is so welcome.

It tentatively agreed to recommend that medical and law enforcement
authorities be allowed to use the state's prescription monitoring system to
search out abusers and the doctors and pharmacists who supply them.

It's those Kentuckians who need to be targeted for control, not good
doctors, not suffering patients and not the effective medications they rely on.