Summit discusses ways to stop drug abuse

A dozen experts agreed Thursday that making a comprehensive database on patients' prescriptions available to pharmacists could help to prevent people from obtaining excessive amounts of drugs.

Assemb. Dean Murray, whose state legislative district includes Haven Drugs -- where four people were killed on Father's Day during what authorities say was a robbery for prescription painkillers -- convened the meeting of experts that included school officials, police, pharmacists, doctors, drug addiction counselors and politicians.

The fatal shooting "was a symptom of a problem that has reached epidemic proportions across our state -- the abuse of prescription drugs, and the crime that goes hand in hand with it," Murray (R-East Patchogue) said. Currently only physicians have access to the patients' prescription database.

"The pharmacy community needs to become involved. We are isolated as an entity," said Joanne Hoffman Beechko, president of the Long Island Pharmacists Society. Gaining access to the list would help pharmacists by letting them see if a customer was "doctor shopping" by getting prescriptions from several doctors for the same medication to try to obtain excessive and illegal amounts of it, officials said.

There are two bills in Albany addressing the database issue, Murray and others said. One would make it available to pharmacists. The other would make it available in "real time," said Assemb. Michael Cusick (D-Staten Island), who is sponsoring the legislation, which Murray is co-sponsoring.

Currently, there is about a month's lag time before information on prescriptions is submitted by pharmacists to the state, Hoffman Beechko said.

Alan Groveman, president of the Suffolk County School Superintendents Association, said another problem is that many young people are obtaining painkillers from their grandparents, who may leave them sitting around the house and often don't count them closely.

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In an interview, Hoffman Beechko added that in the wake of the Medford shootings, "pharmacists are afraid. They're taking all kinds of precautions necessary to protect their stores, their staffs, their patients."

Prosecutors say that the main suspect in the Medford case, David Laffer, shot the four people as part of a robbery to obtain prescription painkillers to which he and his wife may have been addicted.

Jeffrey Reynolds of the Hauppauge-based Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence said the painkiller addiction problem "has been percolating for practically a decade and now has reached a critical mass."

Murray said there seemed to be a lack of communication between all the entities involved in the painkiller issue -- something he hoped that yesterday's summit helped to overcome.

"We have no desire to put together feel-good legislation," he said. "This has to have teeth."