MONTANA - Many medical professionals including pharmacists as well as DEA agents, local law enforcement and medical examiners say prescription drugs are permeating our schools. In fact, they say, college campuses are fast becoming the nation's new pharmacies.
Thursday night, the professionals discuss just how serious and deadly prescription drugs have become. All it takes is a trip to the local pharmacist to find out. Hertha Voorhis has been a pharmacist in Billings for years.
"I've done this for 27 years. and, over the course of the last ten years I've seen it double as far as hydrocodone, oxycontin, precocet prescriptions.”
Dr. Tom Bennet, is a forensic pathologist working for the state of Montana. "It used to be about five percent of my caseload would be drug associated deaths and now fully it's about 25-to-30 percent of my caseload are drug associated deaths not just alcohol and not methamphetamine though we are concerned about those, those don't seem to be the cause of death, it's prescription drugs that are causing the deaths that we see."
Jim Tilley is a Drug Enforcement Administration agent here in Billings. "We're having problems with, we're having overdoses, we're finding people that are dead then we're finding a pocketful of prescription drugs in their pocket so now DEA gets involved, Billings Police Department gets involved and so it's created a little bit of a monster with prescription drugs that we really didn't have that problem years ago. They're just so accessible now and they're so strong.
Statistics quoted by the DEA suggest the use of prescription pain killers including oxycontin, oxycodone and hydrocodone has gone up just in Billings 164% in the past 10 years. And pharmacists are increasingly seeing efforts being made to obtain them illegally.
"Not only do I have to be a pharmacist but I also have to be a policeman to make sure scripts are legitimate. They will forge prescriptions from doctors changing the quantities, changing refills. They will call them in themselves and that is something we never really saw much of and again it has increased greatly over the last ten years.”
And, according to agent Tilley, compounding the problem, people can get prescription drugs right over the internet. "It's making it more accessible for people to buy drugs on the open market and this never used to be a problem but now these things are springing up. Kids can do that, all they need is a credit card so if mom has given their 17 year old Johnny a credit card he can get on the internet and order up Darvon as much as his credit card will hold."
With prescription drugs seemingly so easy to get, the question must be, what can be done about it. There are some who believe they have the answer. Stayed tuned to find out who and how.