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Report on opioids has good news for county

Capital - 7/10/2017

There was good news in a report released last week by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - just not great news.

While medical professionals in Anne Arundel County seem to be prescribing fewer addictive painkillers than at the start of the decade, they're still handing them out at a rate higher than the national average. Given the established link between prescription drugs and opioid addiction, the need for more progress is clear.

All but three of Maryland's counties have seen a decrease in opioid prescriptions between 2010 and 2015, according to the CDC's statistics. But the state's overall prescription rate is nearly three times higher than in 1999.

Painkillers are seen as a key contributor to the state's opioid problem. Many addicts start with prescription opioid painkillers and then turn to street drugs like heroin once the prescription runs out.

We've gotten here through a number of steps. Those include heightened public awareness of the link between opioid abuse and prescription drugs, a prescription-monitoring program designed to detect patients using multiple doctors to fill prescriptions and professional guidelines that urge Maryland doctors to prescribe smaller amounts.

But as Gene Ransom, director of the state's medical society, put it, "squeezing on the supply of opioid" is only part of the battle. Maryland's significant rise in fatal overdoses caused by opioids is largely attributed to illicit street drugs, with the synthetic opioid fentanyl currently the No. 1 killer in Anne Arundel County.

There was a second bit of good news last week: Gov. Larry Hogan released $22 million statewide to fight opioid addiction. Anne Arundel will use its share to expand its "Safe Stations" addiction treatment referral program. Statewide, more than half the funding will go specifically to treatment, the Maryland Department of Health said.

Obstacles remain in expanding treatment options. The General Assembly pumped the brakes this year on Hogan's proposal to create more treatment centers. Anne Arundel has overly restrictive zoning for substitution treatment centers, which allow opioid users to manage their addictions with methadone or similar drugs.

Fran Phillips, acting county health officer, is taking a deeper look at those CDC numbers in hope of deciphering why Anne Arundel prescription numbers are higher than the national average. She already is questioning whether demographic factors, such as the chronic illnesses that come with age, contribute to the trend.

At one end of the addiction problem, county police and health officials work together to track the occurrence, cause and location of overdoses. We hope Phillips' analysis will provide some additional answers at the beginning of this cycle and help address it before those 911 calls are necessary.