Mayor Bloomberg says New York to limit painkillers to emergency rooms, will track bottles with GPS
Last week Mayor Bloomberg let a charge to limit painkillers to emergency rooms as a crackdown on prescription drug abuse. Now Tuesday the NYPD have unveiled a plan to combat the theft of painkillers and other highly addictive prescription medicines by hiding GPS devices on fake pill bottles to track users.
The NYPD believes the so-called “bait bottles” could help investigators track stolen drugs and locate suspects. The initiative will ask pharmacies around the city to hide fake pill bottles fitted with GPS devices amid the legitimate supplies.
Mayor Bloomberg on Thursday announced that emergency rooms in the city’s eleven public hospitals will only be able to give out prescriptions for three days’ worth of Vicodin, Oxycontin and similar drugs.
The emergency rooms will also be barred from refilling prescriptions that patients say were lost or stolen.
“We want all emergency room patients to understand that these painkillers can be dangerous,” Bloomberg said.
We asked about the possibility of a shortage of pain killers for people who actually need them, particularly the poor who use the ER as their primary care doctor.
“Number one, there’s no evidence of that. Number two, supposing it is really true, so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit.”
Prescription drug abuse “can serve as a gateway to criminal activities, especially among young people,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says. “When pills become too expensive, addicts are known to resort to cheaper drugs such as heroin and cocaine. They turn to crime to support their habit.”
The NYPD has begun creating a database of the roughly 6,000 pharmacies in the New York City area with plans to have officers visit them and recommend security measures like better alarm systems and lighting of storage areas. Kelly says it also will ask them to stock the GPS bottles containing fake oxycodone.
“In the event of a robbery or theft, we’ll be able to track the bottle, which may lead us to stash locations across the city,” he says.
GOOD JOB brainiac, ANNOUNCE that you’re putting GPS trackers in the bottles, so that the criminals stealing the pills will pour the pills into another container! Bravo.