The Prescription Drug Awareness Forum was held Tuesday at the Lovell Community Center. Attending was a small group of citizens including law enforcement, mental health and medical professionals to talk to a panel of four Wyoming legislators. The meeting was an exchange of ideas, with legislators asking the crowd details about the prescription drug abuse problem locally and statewide, and others asking the legislators about the process to get something done in the Wyoming Legislature.

With MC Ken Ferbrache busy, being called to the emergency room to work, Chief of Police Nick Lewis began the meeting.

“Hopefully, legislators can tell us the mood of the legislative session, and we (law enforcement, medical) can tell everyone about what we’re seeing at the ground level,” Lewis said. “In law enforcement, I can tell you this is our number one drug problem without a doubt. We combat it daily.”

Lewis said the Big Horn County Prescription Drug Awareness Committee (formerly Drug Enforcement Task Force) has been addressing the problem of increasing prescription abuse for the past two or three years. He said the problem was noticed early on in northwest Wyoming, but the rest of the state has been slow to acknowledge prescription abuse as a real concern.

Sen. Colin Simpson (R-Cody), Sen. Hank Coe (R-Cody), Rep. Elaine Harvey (R-Lovell), Sen. Ray Peterson (R-Cowley) were in attendance, along with about 20 people.

Sen. Coe asked the panel about the seriousness of the situation, and asked about what types of cases law enforcement are dealing with.
“Prescription drugs are relatively new as a concern,” Coe said. “I have been ignorant to the situation until last year. I focus a lot of my attention to education, and I am wondering if there are kids in the K-12 system with prescription drug problems.”

Coe said he would like to see some education initiatives, so the public will be made more aware of the prescription abuse.

Kathleen Cook, administrator of the Big Horn Clinic in Basin, reitterated what Chief Lewis said, agreeing that prescription abuse is becoming an extreme problem in Big Horn County.

“I think one problem is the ease that patients obtain additional prescription medications from Mexico and Canada,” Cook said. “Also, there is a lot more of this going on at our local schools. Kids are getting medications and going to school to sell it.”

Lewis added, “Students in this area, their phones start ringing off the hook after they have a surgery or a broken arm. ‘What did you get? Do you have any extra? Are you willing to sell them?’”

Sen. Coe asked what the most commonly abused types of pills are. Lewis said the painkillers hydrocodone and methadone are popular among abusers, but oxycodone seems to be the drug of choice.

“Is meth still a problem?” Coe asked.

“Locally, where you and I live, prescription drugs is the drug problem,” Lewis said, adding that marijuana will always be around, and there is still some activity related to meth and cocain, but prescription drugs are killing people.

“I’ve been involved in local law enforcement since 1978, and I’ve never seen the deaths in any other drug problem that we’re seeing with prescription drugs.”

“It’s synthetic heroin and that’s what (abusers) have changed to as their drug of choice,” Lewis said, adding that some people think it isn't drug abuse because the pills come from a doctor. For that same reason, it allows anyone with a valid prescription (written to them) to be in posession of the pills. “As long as you hold a bottle with a physician’s name on it, you’re in good shape.”

Lewis said it would be helpful to assemble some statistics about prescription-related deaths, but the data is not readily available.

“The statistics aren’t there,” he said, mentioning that any change in law would be stat-driven.

Dr. Troy Caldwell told the group about the difficulties he sees while talking to patients about pain management.  He first thanked the legislators for the work they did with HB 294, which set up a pilot program for a prescription drug database, but he said providers need real-time access to the database to help providers make tough decisions about writing pain prescriptions on the weekends, when the database is currently unvailable.

Caldwell said it would also help providers if data from other states, such as Montana, was made available or linked to the Wyoming database somehow.

“If we could get access to be 24-7, that would be a huge help to me,” Caldwell said. “That information really does change how I prescribe.”

Caldwell said without the drug database, he is cautious when writing prescriptions, and usually only gives a patient a minimum amount of pills (or sometimes none) rather than a full prescription.

He said he has stopped writing prescriptions (except in emergencies) for people who come to NBHH from Cody or another area that has its own adequate medical facilities.

Other options for legislation the group talked about were increased penalties, changes in sentencing, methods to test for impaired drivers, and creating a statewide group to work on legislation to address the problem.

Peterson brought up the idea that the Select Committee on Mental Health, set to sunset in 2010, could possibly be extended to take on the issue of prescription abuse.

No immediate action was taken at Tuesday’s meeting, but the parties left with more information about the current problem in Wyoming, and agreed to look into some possible solutions before the start of the 2010 budget session in February.