New England lawmakers vow to fight opioid addiction

New England lawmakers met with business leaders Monday to discuss ways to tackle the region’s deadly opioid addiction problem, including tightening regulations around prescription painkillers.

Also Monday, Massachusetts’ top medical schools said they’ve reached an agreement with the state to better teach their students how to recognize, prevent and manage prescription opioid abuse.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, and New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, were among the speakers at the event sponsored by The New England Council.

Baker said one area where New England states are working together is sharing information from their prescription monitoring programs. Baker said the goal is to “get to the point where all of us are in the position where our data is crossing borders so that people won’t be able to basically drug shop from state to state.”

Massachusetts had 1,089 opioid overdose deaths in 2014, a 63 percent increase over 2012.

Hassan said the opioid crisis has also hit New Hampshire hard, claiming 258 lives so far this year in a state with one-fifth the population of Massachusetts. She also called for a more efficient prescription drug monitoring process. Hassan pointed to efforts in Massachusetts to crack down on the powerful narcotic fentanyl, which can be mixed with heroin or cocaine — sometimes without the user’s knowledge.

“We know that we need to bring the laws and penalties in New Hampshire for the distribution and sale of fentanyl in line with those for heroin,” Hassan said.

U.S. Sen. Edward Markey said the country needs a national strategy to stop the over-prescription of pain medication and guarantee that doctors and other medical professionals are educated in responsible prescribing practices.

“The prescription drug and heroin crisis is wearing families down to the bone,” Markey said. “We need to give them hope.”

Drug overdoses have surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury deaths in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with 44 people dying each day from overdoses of prescription opioids like OxyContin.

New England has been hit particularly hard by the epidemic. In Massachusetts, there were 684 opioid overdose deaths in the first half of 2015 alone.

In late October, President Obama vowed to use existing federal programs to combat the prescription opioid and heroin epidemic in the U.S., ordering federal agencies that employ health care providers to offer them training on prescribing painkillers, as well as to address policies that might prevent patients from getting medication as a part of their treatment. 

He also outlined a plan that would make naloxone, an antidote used to counteract the effects of heroin overdoses, more readily available to addicts, particularly in addiction-addled New England. Naloxone was previously only available in hospital emergency rooms or from emergency medical technicians (EMTs), but the FDA in 2014 approved a device called Evzio that injects naloxone in the proper dose and offers verbal instructions for laypeople to correctly administer it, much like defibrillators can.

Several states including New York, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio and Vermont have relaxed restrictions on naloxone, allowing laypeople and first responders to carry it by prescription or standing order at health clinics and needle exchanges.

Medical schools said standards unveiled Monday were developed by the state public health commissioner, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the medical schools at the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, Tufts University, and Harvard University, which have about 3,000 students combined.

Under the 10 “core competencies,” students will learn how to evaluate the risk of opioid addiction, to treat patients at risk of substance abuse before they become addicted, and manage addiction as a chronic disease. Each school will tailor the standards to complement existing curricula to ensure they are delivered to all students.

Also Monday, a group of sheriffs met with Baker to express support for his opioid bill, which would restrict patients to a three-day supply of painkillers the first time they are prescribed an opioid drug, or when they receive a prescription from a new doctor. Patients could seek refills after the three-day period and exceptions would be made for certain chronic conditions.

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press