Combating the abuse of controlled prescription drugs through secure prescription forms (also known as tamper-resistant prescription forms)

How can we fight prescription drug abuse?

Having understood the meaning of “Prescription Drug Abuse”, I wanted to know more about the ways and means to combat prescription drug abuse.

Since tampering, forging and copying of prescription forms are the most relevant ways to get prescription drugs, these are logical targets in the war against prescription drug abuse. One of the most cost-effective and convenient ways of doing so is by implementing the use of counterfeit-resistant prescription forms. This could be one of the reasons for CMS (Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services) has implemented the requirement of tamper-resistant prescription forms by law. CMS mandates the use of tamper-resistant prescription pads for drugs covered by Medicaid. According to a letter by CMS, as of April 1^st 2008, all prescription forms were required contain at least one security feature to be considered tamper-resistant.

The security features outlined by Medicaid are:

1) One or more industry-recognized features designed to prevent unauthorized copying of a completed or blank prescription form;

2) One or more industry-recognized features designed to prevent the erasure or modification of information written on the prescription by the prescriber;

3) One or more industry-recognized features designed to prevent the use of counterfeit prescription forms.

However, no later than October 1, 2008, to be considered tamper resistant, a prescription pad must contain all of the above three characteristics.

After reading about this new law, I feel that this is a great initiative by Medicaid and will hopefully help reduce the amount of prescription drug abuse. This small change may have a great impact on the rising prescription drug abuse in the US.
(Interesting Story - http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080730/hl_nm/usa_drugs_dc)

Prescription Drug Abuse

Recently, I was reading an interesting article on Prescription drug abuse. The article said that the abuse of prescription drugs will soon surpass the use of narcotic drugs worldwide. This made me wonder “What is prescription drug abuse and how does it happen?” I did some digging and found that prescription abuse is the use of a drug for something other than what it was intended. Basically, drugs are used for getting a “high”, etc. Prescription drugs that are most commonly abused are psychotropic drugs. These drugs are usually opiate-based to act as pain-relievers, stimulants, etc. Some of the common drugs which are used are “Valium®”, “OxyContin®”, etc.
These drugs can be obtained in a number of ways, some of which are:

· Through tampered, forged or copied prescription forms
· Through the purchase of drugs online
· By obtaining the same prescription from numerous physicians (double-counting or double-doctoring)
· By stealing prescription drugs from pharmacies, physician offices, etc

I also learned that the life-time use of non-medical prescription pain relievers, amongst young adults (aged 18 to 25) increased to 24.3% in 2004 from 23.7% in 2003 in U.S. This is a 0.6% increase in a period of 1 year. Imagine the impact of a similar increase on the future generations 20 years from now. It would be huge and would impact almost everyone either directly or indirectly. Some of the effects would include:

Industry – Rising health costs would drive up insurance premiums and in turn create a demand for high salaries

Economy – Increasing costs brings along with it the ill-effects of inflation, etc. Total economic costs of prescription drug abuse in 2002 were $180.9 billion

Physicians – Loss of credibility, risks of losing patients, potentially increasing practice insurance