Drug diversion remains a problem in Oklahoma
Despite efforts to crack down on drug misuse in Oklahoma, pain pills still are falling into the wrong hands, according to testimony before the Oklahoma Commission on Opioid Abuse.
The commission, led by Attorney General Mike Hunter, heard testimony about drug diversion presented by law enforcement and others on Friday at the state Capitol. The commission was set up in response to high rates of addiction and overdoses in Oklahoma.
Diversion refers to moving legal prescription drugs into the system of illegal sales.
Capt. Mark Wollmershauser, with Tulsa Police Department’s special investigations division, said the methods of diverting pills vary considerably, and that tactics change when law enforcement cracks down on one supply route. For example, when Tulsa police succeeded in arresting some heroin dealers in 2012 and 2013, people who were addicted turned to robbing pharmacies to obtain opioids, he said. The robberies dried up when pharmacies took precautions to make it more difficult to steal pills.
“By getting them addicted and giving them no way out, we turned them into armed robbers,” he said.
Heroin and opioid pills are chemical cousins, which act on the same areas of the brain to dull pain, cause euphoria and — sometimes tragically — slow breathing. People who are addicted to one will switch to the other if it’s cheaper and more easily available, Wollmershauser said. Heroin typically costs less, but there still is a market for illicit pills, and some gangs have switched from dealing cocaine to pills, he said.
“We’ve seen an increase in pharmaceutical dealings,” he said.
Some unscrupulous doctors, including one in Tulsa who saw supposed patients in her clinic until 2 a.m., have been willing to write prescriptions for dealers, who then resell the medications at a profit, Wollmershauser said. Other dealers or people with addictions obtain one legitimate prescription on paper and make fraudulent copies that they take to multiple pharmacies, he said.
Diversion also can happen in health care facilities. Diana Sturdevant, director of nursing at Mitchell Manor Convalescent Home in McAlester and a member of the Gerontological Advanced Practice Nurses Association, said nursing facilities have to comply with a number of requirements in how they store opioid medications and document their use.
Still, facilities should be vigilant about misuse, Sturdevant said. For example, she spot-checks records to look for patterns of nurses giving an unusual number of “as-needed” pain pills — though the nurse may just be new and need education about when to offer medication.
“Those kind of behaviors we look for and watch for — sort of suspicious trends,” she said.
If doctors checked their patients’ records in the prescription monitoring database more frequently, they might be able to cut down on diversion through copying prescriptions, Wollmershauser said. The main officer in charge of investigating diversion in Tulsa also has advocated for switching to electronic prescriptions to make it harder to produce duplicates, he said.
“E-scripts would put him out of work,” he said.