This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 13th, 2017.

I'm Kila Brown.

States seem at a loss to deal with the opioid crisis and the impulse of state

governments toward greater control of the

relationship between doctors and patients while also pushing for harsher

prison terms may actually make problems associated with opioids worse.

Greg Newburn of Families Against Mandatory Minimum's comments.

How have states dealt with opioids as a topic? You know, they're seeing these huge increases in rates of

addiction of people reporting to emergency rooms and things like that.

What is the law response?

Well, it varies by state and it varies by the phenomenon that they face.

Several years ago, the problem was prescription painkillers particularly oxycodone and to a lesser extent

hydrocodone pills, Vicodin, and whatnot. People were diverting these prescription painkillers

to the black market and then trading them selling them and obviously abusing them and overdosing on those

So that was a problem that had to be dealt with and part of the problem was pill mitt they call pill mills, these kind of quasi medical offices where you could walk in, describe some symptoms, and then walk out with a bottle of Vicodin or Oxycodon.

And so that was a problem.

And those pills were being diverted to the black market

and people were dying in Florida where I work. It was about seven people a day

were overdosing on OxyContin or or hydrocodo. And so the policy response was let's do something about the pill mills.

So we in Florida created a prescription drug monitoring program.

Other states have done the same thing, where you can monitor how much of a particular kind of painkiller a patient can get.

So you know whether someone is being given too much or too little relative to other patients in similar situations.

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