(
)
Abuse of painkillers has reached such shocking proportions that emergency rooms in the city’s municipal hospitals are going to restrict patients to a three-day supply of the addictive pills, officials announced yesterday.
Lost, destroyed or stolen prescriptions won’t be refilled by the ERs.
“This is a problem across the country all of a sudden,” Mayor Bloomberg said at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. “It’s really on a lot of people’s minds.”
Dr. Thomas Farley, the city health commissioner, said 2 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers are written here each year, a startling number in a population of 8 million.
“Make no mistake,” Farley said. “These are dangerous drugs. It’s best to think of them as heroin in pill form.”
He said three-quarters of abusers obtain pills from unthinking relatives and friends, who frequently get more than they need when visiting a doctor or hospital.
Municipal emergency rooms had been dispensing seven-day supplies.
Dr. Lewis Nelson of the non-municipal NYU Medical Center, a member of a painkiller task force appointed by the mayor last year, said that’s excessive.
“Most acute pain — from an ankle injury to a headache, whatever you’d like to pick — lasts two to three days,” he noted.
The task force reported that the number of painkiller-related emergency-room visits shot up 143 percent between 2004 and 2010. Related deaths reached 173 in 2010.
Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, also a member of the task force, said one person dies of a painkiller overdose every 13 days in his borough.
Bloomberg openly worried about the violence associated with those desperate to get their hands on prescription drugs.
Four people were killed — including the pharmacist — when a gunman who stole thousands of pain pills opened fire in a Medford, LI drugstore in June 2011.
The new guidelines are voluntary and doctors still have the discretion to prescribe whatever they feel is necessary in individual cases.
The city doesn’t have the power to impose restrictions on non-municipal hospitals.
But at least one facility said it already has a three-day supply policy in place and officials said they hoped other hospitals would follow the city’s lead.
Doctors are sometimes faced with hard choices when patients turn up in ERs pleading for painkillers for ailments when it’s not obvious that they’re needed, such as a toothache.
“It’s very hard to determine whether they’re seeking drugs for their addiction or drugs for pain,” said Dr. Nelson.