Junkies won't get long-term fix at hospitals anymore

From the Village Voice:

Kudos to Mayor Bloomberg, local prosecutors and medical folks for moving to sharply limit the amount of prescription painkillers doled out in emergency rooms in the city's 11 public hospitals. It's about time someone took on the over-prescribing of highly addictive drugs like oxycodone and hydrocodone by the medical community, which may be a worse contributor to the pill epidemic than the rogue doctors we wrote about in November.

Under the initiative, emergency rooms will only be allowed to prescribe three days worth of pain pills, and won't re-fill lost, stolen or damaged prescriptions. In the past, hospital would prescribe a whole lot more pills as a matter of routine.
The policy is voluntary, which means that hospitals could refuse to implement it. But the public hospitals are doing it, and mayoral spokeswoman Samantha Levine tells us today that the city expects that private hospitals will also going along with the program.