State Rep. Holly Rehder of Sikeston speaks to the Northwest Missouri Opioid Summit at Missouri Western State College/Photo by Brent Martin
By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
An effort to make Missouri the 50th state to have a prescription drug monitoring program failed this past legislative session, again.
Time and again, the legislature has turned back efforts to enact at statewide prescription drug monitoring program, known as a PDMP.
State Rep. Holly Rehder of Sikeston has sponsored the legislation for seven years and is critical of state senators who blocked it this year even as their county enacted a local PDMP.
“You’re not going to stop PDMPs. We’re having them,” Rehder tells St. Joseph Post after speaking at the 2019 Northwest Missouri Opioid Summit in St. Joseph. “And, if you’re not going to fight in your own senatorial district to get rid of them or to not have them come in to start with, because these county commissions had meetings before they joined up with St. Louis County Commission, then don’t prevent the rest of us from having it.”
Rehder, frustrated with yet another legislative failure, wrote an open letter to her colleagues at the end of the session.
“Year after year as we have failed to act thousands of our citizens have lost their lives,” Rehder wrote her colleagues.
She accused the Senate Conservative Caucus, which effectively killed the legislation, of sewing a path of obstruction “not often based on conservative principles.” She challenges some senators who opposed her bill, asking why they didn’t work against enacting a local PDMP.
She wrote in the open letter, “Did they not want to face their voters who were advocating for it, look the affected families in their faces or explain their position to the many medical and emergency professionals who are in the trenches fighting this epidemic every day?” She inferred the senators opposed the PDMP bill for political purposes.
Rehder closed the letter by stating supporters had never asked for a guaranteed outcome in the Senate, but wanted the Senate to vote on the measure.
Rehder tells St. Joseph Post that while the senators block a statewide program, St. Louis County enacted its own.
“If having a conservative, very secure system, is what you’re after then the statewide PDMP is truly the most conservative approach, because the bill that we’re trying to pass does have 4th Amendment and 2nd Amendment protections in there where the St. Louis County program doesn’t,” Rehder says.
Often, a PDMP is promoted as a tool to prevent doctor shopping; the ability for a patient to go from doctor to doctor to get prescribed opioids. Rehder says it also should be seen a preventative measure, beneficial to both the physician and the patient. She says it is needed so doctors know what various pain killers might have been prescribed to their patients.
“Many physicians testified, over the last seven years, over the fact that when they’re prescribing, it’s liking shooting an arrow in the dark sometimes, because they don’t know all the medicines that their patients are on,” Rehder says. “And many can be a lethal cocktail.”
Some Capitol observers had thought PDMP legislation would pass after Sen. Rob Schaaf of St. Joseph, a vehement opponent of PDMP, had to leave the Senate due to term limits. Schaaf for years successfully blocked approval of a statewide PDMP.
Missouri remains the only state not to have a statewide PDMP.