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Moeller’s medication bill in limbo

Representative fears Senate changes won't fulfill legislation's goals

By Kathie Durbin
Published: March 9, 2010, 12:00am

In the final days of the 2010 legislative session, state Rep. Jim Moeller is working for passage of the strongest possible bill to halt abuse of prescription pain medications.

Both the House and the Senate have passed Moeller’s bill, which would require the state’s many health care boards and commissions to adopt consistent rules for prescribing pain medications.

But the Senate version, which passed Thursday on a 37-10 vote, modifies several of the House provisions, and Moeller, D-Vancouver, said he’s working to get compromise language that will still achieve the bill’s purpose: To address what he considers a public health emergency caused by lax standards for the prescription of powerful painkillers.

House Bill 2876 would regulate dosage standards and give guidance to prescribers of pain medication on when to seek advice from a specialist, how to track a patient’s clinical progress and how to document the use of opioids such as oxycodone and OxyContin to prevent addiction.

It would not apply to the use of pain medications for end-of-life care or to the management of acute pain caused by an injury or a surgical procedure.

The House bill would repeal current rules and guidelines by Dec. 1 and require all state boards and commissions to adopt new rules by June 30, 2011. The Senate’s version would delay repeal of the current pain-management rules to June 30, 2011, and create several exemptions and modifications. Under the Senate bill, the new rules would have to be submitted to the 2011 Legislature.

Moeller, who has worked as an addiction counselor for more than 25 years, called the abuse of prescription pain pills “a public health emergency” in Oregon and Western Washington.

“Although it’s reported that fewer and fewer people are using illegal and fundamentally bad stuff such as meth, heroin and cocaine, more and more folks are abusing ostensibly legal medications such as oxycodone and OxyContin,” he said in a statement.

Moeller was prompted to introduce the bill in part by the story of Vancouver’s Payette Clinic. The clinic has been linked to the overdose death of an Oregon high school senior who died after smoking an oxycodone pill originally prescribed to a Payette patient.

In December, Kelly M. Bell, the clinic’s director, lost the ability to prescribe narcotics for two years after the Department of Health investigated numerous complaints that she was prescribing extremely high doses of opioids without appropriate assessment or ongoing monitoring.

Bell’s attorney, Don Grant, acknowledged in January that state standards setting appropriate dosages of opioids are lacking.

Supporters of greater regulation argued in hearings on the bill that overprescription of opioids leads to tolerance and addiction.

The Washington State Medical Association originally opposed the bill, saying it would be a burden on physicians to mandate that they complete continuing education on the use of prescription painkillers.

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