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From
Fox News:
Police in New York City plan to combat the theft of painkillers and other highly addictive prescription medicines by asking pharmacies around the city to hide fake pill bottles fitted with GPS devices amid the legitimate supplies on their shelves.
The New York Police Department believes the so-called "bait bottles" could help investigators track stolen drugs and locate suspects.
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.
There have been similar attempts to track prescription drugs on a limited basis but the NYPD claims this would be the first widespread effort.
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.
