Buchanan promises support in drug fight

SARASOTA COUNTY — U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan isn’t just hearing from parents who have lost children to overdoses on prescription drugs.

He’s hearing from other legislators in other states, as well.

“They (tell me): (Florida) is killing our kids,” Buchanan said at a forum on prescription drug abuse Feb. 28.

More than 100 community members, media and local officials attended the forum at Sarasota City Hall to hear representatives from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Florida Attorney General’s Office and from the sheriffs offices of Sarasota and Manatee counties address Florida’s prescription drug epidemic.

“Florida is the epicenter of this abuse, and we need to take care of it,” Buchanan said. “It’s completely out of hand. We’re looking at the federal level what we can do.”

Possible solutions, he said, include tougher penalties for physicians and others caught inappropriately prescribing or dealing with prescription drugs and a database for monitoring prescription drugs on a federal level. The District 13 representative co-sponsored H.R. 4956, called the Stop Oxy Abuse Act of 2010, which would have reclassified drugs containing oxycodone hydrochloride and limited their approval to use for the relief of severe-only pain if it had passed.

The Florida Legislature passed a prescription drug monitoring program about two years ago, but the program is not yet in operation because of objections raised by one of the contractors who bid on the project but lost. The Florida PDMP Foundation, the organization tasked with funding the project, has raised enough money to pay for the Department of Health to implement the database for at least the first year.

However, under his proposed budget documents, Gov. Rick Scott is seeking to eliminate the program because of concerns with long-term funding. He closed the Office of Drug Control, which acted as a driving force behind the program’s creation while coordinating the efforts of the state’s local drug coalitions.

Dave Aaronberg, a former state senator who now serves as the special council for the State Attorney General’s Office’s pill mill initiative, said the state Attorney General’s Office has retained two Office of Drug Control employees to continue working on the issue.

Contact Pam Eubanks at [email protected].