Senator proposes changes to law restricting pain pills

TALLAHASSEE — The Legislature may have inadvertently made it harder for legitimate patients to get critical pain medications when it passed a 2011 law aimed at shutting down rogue clinics that branded the state as the “pill-mill capital” of the country.

But now a powerful state senator has said he intends to fix the problem.

“The pendulum has gone from one direction to the other direction,” said Senate Health Policy Chairman Aaron Bean, R-Fernandina Beach.

Bean said he will file legislation for the 2016 session aimed at doing away with a perceived cap on the amount of powerful narcotics pharmacies are able to order. The provision was included in the 2011 legislation, which imposed strict regulations about dispensing highly addictive pain medications.

Under the law, “a wholesale distributor must assess orders for greater than 5,000 unit doses of any one controlled substance in any one month to determine whether the purchase is reasonable.”

Though the 5,000 dosage units are only a trigger, some distributors and pharmacies may be treating it as a hard cap, Bean said Tuesday.

“If we were to remove that perceived cap, would that help the problem with the additional supply of medication?” Bean asked Lucy Gee, director of the Florida Department of Health’s Medical Quality Assurance Division.

“Mr. Chair, it could,” Gee said.

Bean said he learned of the issue after media reports about patients forced to embark on the “pharmacy crawl” to find places willing to fill prescriptions for pain medications and after receiving emails from constituents.

Bean also said his sister, a pharmacist, has complained that she can’t get pain medications because her supplier refuses to provide them.

“We will look at this problem. It’s real out there,” Bean said.