BILL TO REDUCE PILL ABUSE ADVANCES

FRANKFORT - A House committee yesterday approved a bill that would
allow regulators and law enforcement agencies to make wider use of
Kentucky's prescription-drug database in fighting pill abuse.

The bill, already passed by the Senate, would let police agencies
investigating the same case share reports, and the bill would require
state health officials to use the database to identify suspicious
patterns of prescribing.

Under current law, each official who needs to view a patient's or
doctor's prescription history as part of a bona fide investigation
must file a duplicate request. And state officials can use the
statistics only to investigate specific complaints, not to spot in
advance geographic areas or medical practices with unusual prescribing
rates.

The Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting System, or
KASPER, contains 3.5 million records on who received and who
prescribed pain pills and other controlled substances since 1999. It
is available only to law officers, medical regulators, doctors and
pharmacists. Improper disclosure of a report is a felony.

The changes to KASPER "won't stop the problem" of pill abuse, Attorney
General Greg Stumbo told the committee. "But it will stop the problem
from getting worse." He said that by analyzing the database regularly,
the state can "direct resources to areas where standards are being
breached."

As occurred when the bill was drafted and when it passed the Senate,
some lawmakers and witnesses voiced concern about patient and
physician privacy, mostly related to provisions already in the law.
Rep. Brent Yonts, D-Greenville, and Rep. Robin Webb, D-Grayson,
suggested tighter controls on law officers' access to the data. Jerry
Cox, a Mount Vernon defense lawyer, urged that access be controlled by
search warrants. The bill goes to the full House, where amendments are
possible.