Ag secretary in Missouri to promote fight against opioid addiction

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack speaks Friday, Feb. 12, 2016, during an event at Fort Stewart, Ga.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack speaks Friday, Feb. 12, 2016, during an event at Fort Stewart, Ga.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, will be in Missouri on Thursday and Friday as part of his fight against opioid addiction - and promoting the need for Missouri to adopt a prescription drug monitoring program, or PDMP.

Missouri is the only state that hasn't created a PDMP.

While many Missouri lawmakers support the idea, a few - especially in the state Senate, where the filibuster can block a bill even from being voted on - have prevented any PDMP proposal from becoming law.

Opponents fear government monitoring of "doctor shopping" - by people seeking more prescription medications, especially painkillers, than they're allowed - violates people's right to privacy.

"It's a significant problem in rural America," Vilsack told the News Tribune on Tuesday. "Because of the nature of work in rural communities, you have an increased risk of the kind of injury that lends itself to the need for pain management."

He noted people's hard work on farms or in manufacturing often leads to back, shoulder and knee problems among others, "so there may be a need for aggressive pain management. That lends itself - and has over the course of the last 15 or 16 years - to more and more prescribing of opioids in rural areas."

Because opioids are effective in pain management, Vilsack said, there has been a 300 percent increase in opioid prescriptions in the last 15-16 years. "That has corresponded to an increase in people misusing the drugs and in the number of people who transition to heroin," he said.

That misuse of opioids, coupled with heroin use, have led to 26,000-28,000 people dying every year, more people than from automobile accidents, Vilsack said.

Without having a PDMP, he said, Missouri becomes a magnet for addicted people from neighboring states who are trying to avoid the monitoring network.

"People will go to great lengths to be able to obtain and feed an addiction," Vilsack said. "They will rob. They will steal. They will borrow.

"And they will travel distances to be able to get access to product - of that there is no question."

A second problem - especially for rural areas - is the difficulty in finding treatment, he said.

"Seventy-six percent of the shortages of mental health services and substance abuse disorder services are in rural areas," he said, noting under 3 percent of the nation's behavioral service centers are in rural communities.

Vilsack - the only original Cabinet member left in President Barack Obama's administration - chairs the White House Rural Council and leads the administration's national initiative on rural opioid addiction.

His trip to Missouri includes two events with U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a fellow Democrat.

On Thursday, they'll host a roundtable discussion in St. Louis County, and Friday they'll hold a 12:45 p.m. town hall meeting at Stephens College in Columbia.

"One of the reasons we're going to St. Louis," Vilsack said, "is because in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County, they have adopted a monitoring system which is allowing physicians operating within the city and county to be able to check with the local pharmacies, to determine whether or not an individual is asking for multiple prescriptions."

He said Missouri needs to have a statewide system like that.