Landry: Opioid crisis a concern within his office

State of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry was the featured speaker, Tuesday, at 16th District Attorney M. Bofill Duhe’s annual Senior Citizen Educational Seminar.
It was held at the pavilion of the Cypress Bayou Casino Hotel and sponsored by the same.
Landry touched on several topics of concern to the senior citizen community, among which were the possibility for Medicaid fraud, prescription painkiller abuse and the effects of the state legislature’s recent budget scare. However, the bulk of the address focused on the state’s opioid crisis.
Landry exclaimed that the Department of Justice was, and is, willing to operate on the same budgets from years past, needing no more consideration now than they did then.
“And I’ll continue to provide services as long as the state is in this fiscal dilemma, and I did that to save you, the taxpayers,” Landry said.
He reminisced about his career in law enforcement, and recalled how it taught him to respect senior citizens and their need for protection.
He said a theme of focus at the Department of Justice was that of how “policy decisions have consequences,” and exampled his point in the context of opioid dependency.
He stated the annual opioid-related death rate in the US is 65,000 people per year.
“That’s twice the number of people that are dying in automobile accidents,” Landry said, “and when I say, ‘policy decisions have consequences,’ I want to lay that out for you, because this is an epidemic that has been compounded and created from policy decisions.”
He discussed the federal drug scheduling system’s conceptual directive of decrease in number value from V to I as being proportional to the drugs’ potential for abuse.
“So, for example, Schedule I drugs, which are all illegal: cocaine, marijuana, fentanyl, heroin, those are Schedule I drugs because those are drugs that have the highest potential for abuse,” said Landry. “Schedule V drugs represent the lowest potential for abuse.”
He stated that in the 1990’s drug manufacturers were successful in reclassifying many of the pain medicines that were in use, positing the reason for such, to be that their potential for addiction was minimal.
According to Landry, this led to doctors prescribing these drugs at a much higher rate due to their being scheduled as less addictive than previously considered.
He said this happened around the same time that pain became medically considered a vital sign.
Landry said the nature of the consideration of pain as a “vital,” was in conflict with the objectivity of the other tests of vital signs, such as pulse, heart rate, blood pressure, etc., because the severity of pain is subjective in nature.
“And so,” he continued, “scheduling pain drugs as a Schedule III and considering pain as a ‘vital,’ you began to see doctors prescribing and overprescribing these opioids, and of course, we started to see in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, an epidemic starting to form. People started overdosing.
“So, what does the government do? They reschedule these opioids from a III to a II.”
According to Landry, the rescheduling, on its face, would seem to indicate the unavailability of the opioids, which should have eased the epidemic of overuse. However, he said also that what had been misunderstood of the situation was that the addiction to the opioids had already been fostered, and that rescheduling the drugs only forced the addicts to seek out illegal drug markets to feed their habits.
“So, we have this epidemic, and we’re compounding the problem by continuing to make poor policy decisions.”
His next example of “policy decisions having consequences,” was the governor’s expansion of Medicaid and the effects Landry believes it has had on the opioid epidemic.
After having described the governor’s decision to expand Medicaid as having been done hastily and without much discussion, Landry went on to say, “Prior to the extension of Medicaid, taxpayers were paying for about 390,000 prescriptions for Medicaid patients.
“In 12 months, that number doubled. In 12 months we increased the number of opioid prescriptions in the state, simply by not thinking: Look, we’re going to make this expansion. What are the problems we see it causing in the community?
“I don’t even want to think about the number of addicts that this created.”
He went on to cite the number of overdoses in the state having tripled since 1999, making Louisiana one of the nation’s top 10 states for opioid overdose deaths.
“We are now only one of eight states,” said Landry, “under which there are more prescriptions for opioids than we have people in the state, and that’s a problem.”
According to Landry, the problem can be “fixed” through calls to community action to clean out medicine cabinets of all unused opioids, and bring them to the drop boxes located at parish sheriff’s offices.
He also discussed a deal he made, upon election, in which he worked with a drug company which was being tried in court for their practices. Landry said he worked with the company, to lessen their reparations by donating $1 million worth of Naloxone, a narcotic blocker, to law enforcement agencies state-wide, beginning a program started through a policy created to that effect.
He also touted educational programs started under his time in office, to reach Louisiana communities in need.
Before closing, Landry touched on two more topics.
He said he has always been in favor of criminal justice reform. But, he also said that he thought that at “the height of a drug epidemic and the height of a violent crime epidemic, instituting that reform, without knowing the consequences, can and is having severe effects.”
He again lambasted the current governor for lowering the incarceration level in the state by “just opening the jail cells.”
“There was no vetting,” Landry said. “The Criminal Justice Re-Investment Committee, I wasn't on it. There was one DA, one sheriff and one judge, people that work every day in the criminal justice system.
“And of course, when we started to criticize it, well, they had a hard time getting it right.”
He explained that under last year’s enacted statute of inmate re-investment, the recidivism rate has gone from 15 percent to 25 percent, with the first year of effect having not yet dusked, and many of those crimes being perpetrated on senior citizens.
The second of his last topics was a call for spending reform and policy implementation, “As our government grows and raises more taxes, I believe our state will remain economically stagnant at a time when the nation is growing.
“The policy decision to expand Medicaid without an understanding of conditions has resulted in a bulging budget that is awash in fraud, waste and abuse.
“I could talk about that for another hour. It’s unfortunate.”