This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 18th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The opioid crisis is a misnomer, according to Cato Senior Fellow and Surgeon Jeff Singer. He says a close

examination of the data will reveal that the opioid crisis is really a heroin

crisis and he argues that states are primed to move in the wrong direction with respect to that crisis.

We spoke at the Cato Institute's Health Policy Summit earlier this month.

The opioid crisis has driven a lot of states and the feds to make some changes to policy that I think

you argue are counterproductive or at least ineffective. So what are states doing that they just absolutely

shouldn't be doing? Well one of the things the states have been doing for quite

some time now is implementing prescription drug monitoring programs or PDMPs.

Actually, some of these were around in 1990s, but by 2010, 37 states had implemented them, and now every state has implemented them, with the

exception of Missouri, which has been problematic problematic but it's implemented on the county level in most of Missouri.

So we've had a lot of years of experience of these prescription drug monitoring programs.

And what they do is they keep track of every prescription

given out to a patient and written by a doctor

and a surveillance system basically.

And then doctors are given reports.

It varies from state to state, but the doctors are given reports of their prescribing

numbers in the past quarter and they're compared to their colleagues.

And it's not broken down on a per capita patient basis.

It's just total number of prescriptions written.

So you could have written a lot of prescriptions because we have a lot of patients, but it's just the wrong number. And that is in some states, it's being used as a way of finding what are suspected as guys operating pill mills

...