Five Bowling Green residents died last week in apparent prescription drug overdoses.
“We have seen a dramatic increase in that over the last several years,” Warren County Coroner Kevin Kirby said.
Pending toxicology reports on the five will give Kirby an absolute answer to the cause of death. However, evidence at each scene points to accidental prescription drug overdose as the killer.
Last week’s victims are part of a growing prescription drug abuse trend in Kentucky, making its way west from the eastern part of the state. Some 82 people die every month in Kentucky from prescription drug overdoses.
“It’s staggering, the destruction we’re seeing from prescription drug abuse,” Warren County Commonwealth’s Attorney Chris Cohron said. “I would say 90 to 95 percent of the cases we see in circuit court have a drug component to them.”
Dr. Bart Spurlin, the emergency room medical director at The Medical Center, is not surprised by the number of drug overdose deaths here last week.
Spurlin estimates that 10 to 20 percent of the people seeking emergency room treatment are actually trying to get their hands on prescription meds. He estimates that a higher percentage of emergency room patients are seeking treatment for something that has been caused by drug abuse, such as falls, car wrecks, burns and infections caused by dirty needles.
“We know for a fact that one in five Kentuckians are addicted to some sort of prescription drugs,” Spurlin said.
“It is truly an epidemic,” he said. “The flu outbreaks always make the news, but this sort of thing is the ongoing epidemic.
“I think almost every family has a family member or distant relative who has this problem with drug abuse, but they don’t necessarily want to talk about it.”
Law enforcement officials specializing in drug investigations have seen a dramatic jump in the number of prescription pills seized and drug diversion. Drug diversion is what occurs when one person obtains prescription medicine legally and then sells it to someone else.
Typically drug abusers are looking for narcotic pain medicines such as hydrocodone, oxycodone, OxyContin, Dilaudid, methadone and benzodiazepine drugs such as Klonopin and Valium.
“I think we’re seeing prescription diversion picking up here in the west,” said Kentucky State Police Capt. Bill Payton, who oversees the Drug Enforcement Special Investigations West division in Bowling Green. DESI detectives investigate drug cases in Warren and 62 other counties in the western part of the state.
In 2005, DESI West investigators seized 28 hydrocodone pills compared with 2,339 in 2009 and 30,609 in 2010; 58 Xanax pills compared with 283 in 2009 and 3,385 in 2010; and 90 OxyContin pills compared with 728 in 2009 and 4,534 in 2010.
The 2010 numbers are higher than a normal investigative year because of a large-scale drug seizure that took place in 2010, Payton said. However, the numbers are still climbing at an alarming rate when comparing 2005 against 2009.
The Bowling Green-Warren County Drug Task Force has shown substantial year-over-year gains in some categories as well, Director Tommy Loving said. In 2008, task force investigators seized one hydrocodone pill. In 2009, that number climbed to 201, and last year investigators more than doubled the number when they seized 424 hydrocodone pills. In 2009, the task force didn’t seize any oxycodone. Last year investigators seized 152 pills.
Opana, a relatively new name to law enforcement officials, is a painkiller that is also starting to gain popularity among drug abusers in the western part of the state, Payton said. Last year DESI investigators seized 291 Opana pills. So far this year, they have seized 928.
“That’s pretty substantial growth there,” Payton said.
While many abusers get their hands on pills by going from one doctor to the next in search of prescriptions, the vast majority of pills are coming from out of state.
Many out-of-state clinics that bill themselves as pain clinics are really what investigators call “pill mills.” In a pill mill, a patient can walk in, pay a fee, see a doctor briefly and walk out with 100 or more pain pills. Florida pill mills have plagued Kentucky law enforcement officials for several years. Prescription pills are also making their way into the commonwealth from Michigan and Mexico.
Yet Florida remains “the number one source state” for diverted prescription drugs here, said Kentucky State Police Lt. Vic Brown, who is the KSP liaison to the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
“We’re trying to go after some of the rogue doctors,” Brown said about the Florida drug pipeline. “We’ve closed down three clinics already.”
But just like any other government agency, manpower and dollars are stretched thin for law enforcement officials, who often have to divert their attention to Kentucky’s other problem drug, methamphetamine. When law enforcement officials are notified about a meth lab, they have to suit up and respond to remove the lab because the chemicals are volatile. One-bottle meth labs can become fireballs in an instant. That means taking attention away from pill cases.
“This is a problem we can’t arrest our way out of,” Brown said. “It’s going to take legislation to stop the (out of state) doctors,” Brown said. He would like to see a nationwide prescription drug monitoring program.
“We don’t really have that big of a problem in Kentucky,” Brown said about doctors over-prescribing. He attributes that to the electronic prescription drug monitoring system known as the Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting, or KASPER, system. Any doctor or pharmacist can sign up to use the system, which allows them to see if their patient has already obtained a prescription for the same or similar drug from another doctor. When used, it prevents doctor shopping, Loving said.
Spurlin is among the minority of Kentucky doctors signed up to use the KASPER system. Only 30 percent of Kentucky doctors use it, and 23 percent of pharmacists use it.
“Overall we have an excellent medical community here and get excellent cooperation from physicians,” Loving said. “The majority of physicians don’t want to deal with doctor shopping to begin with. We just wish more of them would use KASPER.”
