The federal data is stunning. According to Drug Enforcement Administration records, millions of prescription opioid pills flooded Bartholomew County from 2006 to 2012.
Just more than 36 million prescription oxycodone and hydrocodone pills were shipped to pharmacies in the county during that period, according to the DEA’s Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System. That’s enough for roughly 68 pills per person each year.
Bartholomew County’s opioid prescription rate (per 100 people) exceeded state and national rates every year from 2006 to 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Also, according to Open Payments, a national transparency program by the federal government, representatives of opioid manufacturers Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt and Depomed Inc. met often — on at least 93 occasions with 27 prescribers in Columbus — from 2013 to 2017 to promote their opioid brands, such as OxyContin and Nucynta. Sometimes the meetings involved all-expenses-paid meals.
What the data provides is a local snapshot of the broader national issue: pharmaceutical companies promoting their products and trying to influence prescribers, and opioids, which can be highly addictive, being prescribed freely.
The information also underscores the importance of efforts locally to curb opioid misuse that has become an epidemic in Bartholomew County the way it has become an epidemic nationally.
The Alliance for Substance Abuse Progress was the answer to the local opioid and addiction problem, which included a startling number of fatal overdoses, and still includes many overdoses. Key stakeholders such as law enforcement, the court system, health care leaders, local government and counselors joining forces in 2017 to create a treatment and recovery system.
That system now has three problem-solving courts, an outpatient treatment and support center, which provides outpatient care, men’s and women’s residential abuse programs and plans for men’s and women’s faith-based adiction recovery centers.
Equally important, Columbus Regional Health began using Epic — a unified medical platform — in 2017, a feature of which helps monitor opioid prescribing by physicians. Epic allows prescribing thresholds to be set, generates warnings if a prescription exceeds the threshold and offers suggestions for lowering the dosage or shortening the duration of treatment.
Federal data shows how widespread prescribed opioid pills have been in this community. The impact of opioid overprescription, in addition to misuse, can’t be overcome quickly. It will be felt for years and requires long-term solutions.
Thankfully, we’ve seen a serious, determined, collective effort to put a sustainable treatment and recovery system in place.
