SALT LAKE CITY—With opioid abuse on the rise, one lawmaker is trying to tighten the reins on prescribing the drugs through HB15.

“I was on call and I got a phone call from the police saying a woman had died,” said Rep. Ray Ward, R-Bountiful. “They wanted me to sign the death certificate. She was not my patient but I was the doctor on call.”

The woman was in her early 60s, he said. “Her daughter was there with her earlier and her mother was acting sleepy and groggy. She left and when she came back she found her mother dead on the floor. She was not addicted to medication so far as I know, but if you look at her chart she had been prescribed four different medications. It appears she died because of a sedative. It wasn’t a post surgery thing, she’d had surgery but that was two months ago.”

Ward’s bill would require physicians to check the controlled substance database to see if a patient is already getting a narcotic or sedative from another provider. “Then they must contact the other prescriber and document that they’ve talked to the other person before putting the patient on a long-term prescription narcotic,” he said. 

Of the people who are addicted to meth or heroin, 80 percent started from a prescription they can’t get off of, said Ward. “We’re losing about 75,000 people to overdose deaths from narcotics or narcotics mixed with a sedative. We’ve had that many dying every year for the last several years.” 

The risk of death is six times higher with narcotics, he said. “They just put you to sleep enough to stop breathing, like the case of this lady. Three different doctors were each giving her a sedative. If they’re coming from different providers there’s a much higher risk because they don’t talk to each other.”

In the old days patients were blamed for doctor shopping, said Ward. “They’d go from doctor to doctor trying to get medication. But there’s not really such a thing now. A patient can’t lie to you because a doctor can go onto the database and see what they’re on. My bill would make 

sure that both prescribers talked and ideally just one prescriber has one conversation with the patient about all the addictive and sedating medications.”

HB15 passed out of committee and was scheduled to be heard in the House.