MUNCIE, Ind. - A rising number of fatal drug overdoses in central Indiana is causing health officials, police and anti-drug groups to take a hard look at the issue of prescription drug abuse, and how to prevent it.
Drug overdoses have caused or contributed to 77 deaths in Delaware and Henry counties since 2009, The Star Press reported.
"That's a significant number," Delaware County Coroner Scott Hahn said. "And I think there's probably a bigger problem than we're seeing. We're just seeing the tip of it."
Nationally, unintentional drug overdose is the second-leading cause of accidental death in the United States. More than 6 million Americans admitted to abusing prescription pills within the past month, according to the Caron Treatment Centers.
April Rovero, who founded the National Coalition Against Prescription Drug Abuse after her son died of an overdose in 2009, said easy access to family members' unused prescriptions, overprescribing by physicians and young adults' tendency to experiment with drugs are contributing to the problem.
She said some doctors live in "a little bit of an information bubble" and ignore the prescription drug addiction problem.
"They're over-treating a condition with the heavy narcotics that could have alternative treatments as a first-course of treatment," Rovero said. "But they're just giving out the prescriptions first."
Jan Kornilow, an emergency room physician at Indiana University Health Ball Memorial Hospital, said patients have a responsibility to be honest with their doctors.
"If the patient comes in and says they have pain, as a physician, our duty is to treat that pain," said Kornilow, who has worked as medical director of Delaware County Emergency Medical Service. "It's really hard to tell if it's people coming in for true problems or not. It's incredibly hard to quantify."
One tool that's proving helpful comes from the state.
The Indiana Scheduled Prescription Electronic Collection and Tracking program was designed to address the problem of prescription drug abuse and diversion by maintaining a "warehouse of patient information" for health care professionals. Doctors are required to transmit a record in the computer program each time a patient is prescribed a controlled substance.
An INSPECT report summarizes the controlled substances a patient has been prescribed, the practitioner who prescribed them and the dispensing pharmacy where the patient obtained them.
"So if there's something fishy or suspicious, you can look up when the last time a patient got a dose of pain medication," Kornilow said.
Hahn and law enforcement officials said there's no one tool that will help solve the problem.
"Everybody has to do their part to make it go away," Hahn said.
Rovero said increasing awareness of the issue is the first step.
"I believe that we have to spread awareness within every segment of every community," she said. "Establish a task force in your own backyard and your local community to bring this terrible problem to light."
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