PDMP – prescription drug monitoring pgms Arizona

Since Janet Napolitano enacted the House Bill regarding prescription drug monitoring programs in Arizona,  certainly much money has been allocated to this program. 

In all,  from 2003 to 2007  more than $$ 50 Million Dollars  have  been spent on various PDMP’s across 33 states in the USA,  including Arizona.   The program is designed to inhibit a person who is addicted to prescription drugs from being able to “doctor shop” and get multiple prescriptions filled in various pharmacies.  

At the end of the day,  while this program is designed to curb prescription drug addiction,  can anyone say that 50 Million dollars toward MONITORING abuse was a wise investment?   Perhaps it was a step in the right direction.   But monitoring addiction has the end product of knowing how much doctor shopping has been going on.   It doesn’t do a thing, sadly,   to help persons who are addicted to the point where they would have to stoop to such tactics to satisfy their addiction.  

Would not a better program be to allow for voluntary disclosure of prescription drug addiction and a discreet and fully or partially funded recovery program for persons so addicted?   Why does criminality enter in to addiction when addiction is regarded as a disease in the mainstream of treatment protocols in use?  I don’t happen to believe that addiction is a disease,  but neither do i think it is a crime -  rather I would say addiction is a result of ingesting addictive substances.    These are legal substances.   They are made and promoted and marketed  by trillion dollar industry pharma companies. 

Maybe instead of personal or class action lawsuits against the drug makers,  I would prefer to see a program where hefty amounts like $50 million are procured through  mandatory “drug makers tax “  not taxing the citizens who aren’t causing the problem.   This tax money could be used to provide tapering and healing recovery programs for the addicted victims of these substances. 

The amount of $50 million dollars could finance 2500 to 5000  individual drug rehab programs for people who want to end their prescription addiction.   As it is now,  these funds are scooped from the pockets of tax payers,  and spent on a MONITORING program that is designed to “catch criminal activities”   -  this is about as ineffective  a solution as you could possibly find.    

Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs have possibly done some good in shining the spotlight on a problem that needs to be made more well known.   But simply monitoring a problem (especially at the high cost  mentioned)  doesn’t go anywhere near solving the problem.   To pretend that prescription drugs are not addictive is probly THE MOST criminal intent in the scenario,  and that promotional line is coming straight from the manufacturers of these toxic drugs.   

 So  it seems plain enough that the problem is not “doctor shopping”  per se.   That is a SYMPTOM.  When it comes to drugs versus disease and symptoms,  there seems to be quite a lot of confusion regarding which is which.  Clearly,  doctor shopping is a symptom of addiction,  and the solution is TREATMENT rather than JAIL TIME.   Perhaps the idea of taxing the drug makers would cause them to take responsibility for the number of ruined lives they have created.  That is the blood on the hands of those who make the huge profits off the addictions they are creating.