AN INFORMATION WAR ON DRUGS

Virginia needs its pilot prescription-monitoring program not only to
continue, but to expand beyond its current limited reach.

Since Virginia started a pilot prescription-monitoring program in
Southwest Virginia about a year ago, the region's wave of drug
addiction and related crime has not subsided.

That is not an argument for ending the program, but for expanding it.
The General Assembly should make the pilot project permanent - right
after reluctant lawmakers take the steps needed to make it fully effective.

For starters, they should include all of Virginia in the program, as
it was originally conceived. And they should support a national
group's push to get states to share their data.

The monitoring program is a database of information pharmacists must
enter when they fill prescriptions for addictive medicines: the
patients who get the drugs, the doctors who prescribe them. The
Department of Health Professions is the gatekeeper. Access to the
information is strictly limited, as it should be, to protect the
privacy of people who have a legitimate need for the drugs and use
them as prescribed.

Those few professionals who do have access have a legitimate need,
also - to know when prescriptions are being abused. Doctors, for
instance, should know what prescriptions for powerful painkillers
their patients might have received from other doctors before writing
their own.

Law enforcement officials say doctor-shopping is the most common way
legal, controlled drugs such as OxyContin and methadone enter the
black market. In rural Southwest Virginia, where abuse of both is
epidemic, addicts or pushers can easily skirt the prescription-monitoring
system. Doctors in West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and
Tennessee are a short drive away. And, of course, drug abusers can
always go to Virginia doctors and pharmacies outside of Health
Planning Region III - the pilot program area - to fill their illicit
prescription needs. People in Radford, say, can go to Montgomery
County; those in Bedford County can cross the line into Roanoke County.

Still, doctors and police who have used the database to discover
doctor-shoppers have shown how effective it can be.

The General Assembly authorized the two-year pilot in 2002, when a
plague of OxyContin abuse in Appalachia was stunning news. Unless
legislators extend the program next year, it will expire.

Drug-related deaths in the western district of Virginia last year
totaled 223, up from 101 in 2000.

Lawmakers should keep the database - and expand it.