HARRISBURG, May 6, 2014 – State Sen. Judy Schwank today voted in favor of a bill to create a prescription drug monitoring program that would increase the quality of patient care, give health care consumers a better record of the drugs they have been prescribed, and help law enforcement agencies prevent fraud and drug abuse.

The Pennsylvania Senate overwhelmingly approved Senate Bill 1180 this afternoon.

Sen. Schwank said the measure would help Berks County families who have been wracked by heroin-related deaths and arrests in the past year, including the arrests this week of 13 Topton-area residents and the deaths of six Kutztown and Brandywine Heights high school graduates since 2013.

“Even though heroin is not subject to this registry, the back story to heroin overdoses often is that victims turned to this deadly drug … only after becoming addicted, often legitimately, to more costly prescriptive medications,” Schwank said during Senate debate. “The registry this bill would establish will help to prevent that.”

According to an October 2013 report, Prescription Drug Abuse: Strategies to Stop the Epidemic, Pennsylvania had the 14th highest drug overdose mortality rate. A majority of the deaths were prescription drug related.

In fact, the study said, Pennsylvania has experienced an 89-percent increase in drug overdose deaths since 1999; moving from 8.1 per 100,000 people to 15.3 per 100,000.

Schwank has worked with 11th Senatorial District families, local police officers, health professionals and addiction counselors to find a way to decrease prescription drug abuse. She said she voted for SB 1180 because the latest version of the proposal promises to help them do a better job while maintaining the privacy of consumers.

“The news regularly reports acts of misuse of personal information by public and private entities that obtain it legally, of its theft by hackers seeking to cause mischief or with deeper criminal intentions, and of hard-to-correct data base errors that are accidental but still cause serious consequences to the individuals involved,” the senator said. “These are all risks that need to be taken seriously, because the harm they cause can be quite serious.

“Sen. Vance deserves congratulations for her leadership on this bill, and I, personally, want to acknowledge her willingness to work with those, like me, who were concerned by particular aspects of the bill as it initially was crafted,” Sen. Schwank said.

###

Follow Sen. Schwank on her website, Facebook and Twitter.