Aug 22, 2015 3 min read

Seventeen overdoses.

That was the toll heroin exacted in Washington County last Sunday. Three of the overdoses were fatal. There have been more overdoses since and, rest assured, more will follow.

Unfortunately, Washington County is not unique – heroin has cut a destructive path through many pockets of the country, its use fueled by its low cost and ubiquity.

Tackling the problem can seem like putting the proverbial finger in the dyke. There are a melange of reasons heroin use has exploded, and no quick-fix solutions. But there is a concrete step lawmakers in Harrisburg could take that could help stem the tide: Getting the controlled substances database that was enacted into law last year operating and fully functional.

At first glance, prescription drug abuse and heroin addiction would appear to be separate, unrelated dilemmas. But they are tightly intertwined. Such prescription painkillers as OxyContin and Vicodin are considered by many experts to be gateways to heroin use, particularly since heroin is easy to obtain and actually costs less than opiates available behind the pharmacist’s counter. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has estimated individuals abusing prescription painkillers are 40 times more likely to “graduate” to heroin, and nearly half of young people who had injected heroin said they abused prescription opioids first.

Before the heyday of OxyContin and Vicodin, heroin abusers would just go through withdrawal if they couldn’t satisfy their cravings, Drexel University sociologist Stephen E. Lankenau told The New York Times last year, but now “users switch back and forth, to pills then back to heroin when it’s available, and back again. The two have become integrated.”

With a prescription drug database in place – Missouri is the only other state that lacks one – Pennsylvania would be better able to control the flow of legal, but still dangerous, controlled substances. It would be able to track and stop “doctor shopping” by patients who get prescriptions from multiple physicians, and then either abuse the drugs they receive or peddle them to other addicts.

The law creating the prescription drug database was signed by Gov. Tom Corbett last October, just days before his defeat by Tom Wolf, with a target date for it to be working by June 30. However, the money to build it was never allocated, and funding remains uncertain as Wolf and Republicans in the General Assembly try to assemble a budget that is now almost two months overdue. Wolf wants a little more than $2 million to be put aside for the database, and there’s no indication that amount has been a bone of contention in the budget back-and-forth, considering the database has found support on both sides of the aisle. The only question is when the budget will be completed. There were some promising signs at the end of last week, but it might be too soon to break out the champagne and shoot off the fireworks.

The urgent need for the prescription drug database to be in place and effective is yet another reason for legislators and the governor to redouble their efforts and resolve the budget stalemate.

When Corbett signed the bill authorizing the prescription drug database, it was given a sunset date of June 30, 2022. Will it be operating by then? We sure hope so.