Governor Dan Malloy of Connecticut revealed a series of measures at preventing and combating opioid addiction. The proposals in his legislative package is what he terms as common sense approach to reduce the potential for people getting addicted and dying from opioid overdose. The way the Common Sense Approach works is that doctors must warn minors of the risk of addiction before prescribing them opioid painkiller pills.
Adults will be also warned before being prescribed the pills. The patients would be able to refuse opioid medications under the proposed plan. Doctors in Connecticut have the option to prescribe the painkillers to patients electronically or by paper, under the new proposal by Malloy, all opioid prescriptions will be done electronically. According to the governor, prescription by paper is hard to trace whereas if the drug is prescribed electronically, it can be instantaneously traced. This will make documenting on who is getting the drug and who is prescribing the opioid painkillers easier.
Malloy’s proposal would grant home health care nurses the ability to destroy unused medications on behalf of their patients as based on statistics, six out of 10 patients do not finish their course of opioid painkillers. The current law only allows the patient or a legal caregiver to destroy unused pills.
Undestroyed opioid painkillers mean that there is a lot of product available in homes. Gov. Malloy states that persons who are addicted to opioids have easy access to the drugs as they can find it at someone else’s house, in cabinets in the bathrooms, lying around in houses. The new proposal also calls for easing of restrictions on data shared between state agencies as a way to root out the bad players as stated by Malloy as reported in an article by WNPR.
Not long after Malloy’s announcement of the proposal, Senate GOP Leader Len Fesano issued a statement highlighting the issue. Fasano stated that while he applauds the efforts to combat opioid abuse and he thanks the governor for sharing the proposals to help in tackling the public health crisis of opioid addiction and deaths from overdose, Fesano stated that the state needs to make a commitment to protect core social services that help people recover from addiction.
Fesano went on to state that during the last budget, Gov. Malloy and democrat leaders made deep cuts to mental health and substance abuse services. Republican plans to restore the funding have been rejected. Fesano said that while there are budget difficulties this year, services that help those with drug addictions cannot be slashed as they were in the past as reported in an article by Hartford Courant.
