LEWISTON, Maine - Maine Attorney General Janet Mills and more than two dozen of her counterparts in other states are asking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to close a loophole that keeps methadone clinics from reporting their dispensing data to state Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs.
These are programs that collect patient-specific data on controlled prescription medications, including addictive painkillers, so that doctors, pharmacists, and others can access the information to make sure patients are not doctor shopping or abusing drugs.
Mills says methadone has traditionally been excluded because of privacy concerns around drug treatment. In a letter to U.S. DHHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, Mills and her colleagues say the time has come to change the rules.
"We're in the business of saving lives. It's plain and simple," Mills says. "And this is one step that will help us all save lives using the Prescription Monitoring Program. It's one of the prescribers' and pharmacists' best tools to reduce conflicting medications and to reduce harmful overdoses, to reduce multiple pharmaceuticals in people's systems."
In their letter, Mills and the other attorneys general point out that buprenorphine, another drug used to treat patients with opioid use disorder, is included on Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs. They say it's illogical to include one drug and not the other and that it creates "an arbitrary and dangerous distinction" between the two.
