By EMS1 Staff
ST. Paul, Minn. — Minnesota lawmakers are fighting against the opioid epidemic with several proposed laws.
MPR News reported that State Rep. Dave Baker, who lost his son to an opioid overdose, wrote two bills to prevent further deaths from occurring.
One bill would require opioid prescriptions to be less than 30 days old in order for pharmacists to fill them, and the other would impose a stewardship fee of one cent per milligram of opioids in a pill.
“We want to be aggressive about this. We want to go after the folks that have hurt our communities like no one else has. We are asking them and demanding [that they] step up to the table,” Baker said.
The money raised from the tax, which is expected to be around $20 million, would fund addiction treatment and overdose prevention.
“We need money to take care of prevention, treatment, aftercare. And we need it to also take care of these children who’ve been affected at the local level,” said Sen. Julie Rosen, who is sponsoring a similar bill in the Senate.
PhRMA spokesperson Nick McGee said those who are suffering from pain would be penalized by the proposed tax and that the bill “ignores the factors that led to this public health crisis, including the substantial influx of heroin, counterfeit fentanyl and other illegal drugs.”
Joe Rannazzisi, who ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, said he was pushed out of his job for speaking against federal laws that made it difficult to prosecute drug distributors who did not report suspicious orders.
“You’re going to hear that the problem is fentanyl and heroin, and it is,” Rannazzisi said. “It’s a big problem. But we cannot get to fentanyl and heroin without starting at the prescription drugs. We didn’t have a fentanyl and heroin problem in 1999, when this nonsense started. We did have a problem with prescription drugs, and it just got worse and worse.”