Gov. Eric Greitens, a former Democrat turned Republican, signed an executive order on Monday directing the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services to create prescription drug monitoring database to curb opioid overprescribing.
The unilateral move comes after state legislation to establish a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program failed in the House after passing in the Senate. The Senate plan included a privacy provision that would require data on prescription monitoring to be purged after 180 days. House leaders said the timeframe was too short and said the plan would permit highly addictive medicines like Adderall to go untracked. Missouri is currently the only state without a PDMP to track the possible overprescription of opioids, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"We need to be honest and clear about the scale of what we are up against: Opioids are a modern plague," said Gov. Greitens. "There's not a corner of our state that hasn't been visited by this curse. There is no single program, or law, or executive order that can fix this crisis. This program is a step — and it's a big step … We won't wait for this problem to get worse. That's not an option."
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