• In an effort to stop drug companies from enabling addicts, a new Indiana law limits the amount of pills doctors can prescribe.
• Ball State will not see much of a change because the law is specific to people with chronic pain, a problem the Health Center does not often deal with.
A new legislature targeting “pill mills,” which supply pills to people hooked on prescription medications, will limit the amount of prescription pills doctors are allowed to prescribe.
The legislation will go into effect this month. Before prescribing drugs, doctors will have to do more screening on patients and track the prescriptions they give out with a program called INSPECT. Patients might have to submit to drug tests before and during their prescription.
Sen. Ron Grooms, co-author of the legislation, said the bill grows from a concern about overprescribing narcotics in the state by physicians who are solely in the practice to prescribe drugs without proper medical procedure or policy. Those wishing to abuse their prescriptions then exploit these doctors.
College students are often cited as those who are more likely to abuse prescription medication. Their first use may be to pull an all-nighter to study for upcoming finals, said both Deidre Dorman of the Amelia T. Wood Health Center and University Police Department Chief Gene Burton.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, many people assume prescription drugs are safe to overtake because doctors prescribe them. When doctors prescribe medicines, they do so at a safe level, reducing the chance of having harmful side effects. If the drugs are taken non-medically, there are unknown risks and the drugs can become addictive.
Dorman said the Health Center writes small numbers of opioid prescriptions for acute pain for students and employees with short-term injuries. The center does not offer services to help students stop abusing prescription drugs.
The Health Center is only marginally affected by the new legislation because it targets those suffering with chronic pain, which with Dorman said the center readily deals.
However, if a physician at the Health Center, or any other doctor’s office, were found to prescribe addictive drugs above normal limits, then the state police and the attorney general’s office would investigate them. The information gathered would continue to be monitored through several law offices, Grooms said.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about 7 million people used prescription drugs non-medically in 2010, which is around 2.7 percent of the U.S. population. The most commonly abused medicines are pain relievers, tranquilizers, stimulants and sedatives.
Grooms said the goal of the new legislation is to curb the number of prescriptions that are written by physicians who only want to make money.
“The reason this problem continues is because you can continue the addiction of people who are addicted to medications, usually unnecessarily and usually at the expense of a physician who wants to make a profit,” he said.
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