Before becoming governor and lieutenant governor, and I quickly learned the #OpioidEpidemic was something that must be prioritized after hearing gut-wrenching stories from people everywhere we went.
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Our administration made it a team effort to take a big swing at dozens of reforms and legislation to fight this crisis. We are seeing some progress, and are also pleased that some of our efforts are being used as a national blue print to help other states.
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Our first major move was the bipartisan enactment of the STEP Act, which established MA as the first state in the nation to implement a seven day limit on first-time opioid prescriptions for adults. Today, opioid prescriptions are down by nearly 30% in the Commonwealth.
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We partnered with our colleges and universities, and today nearly every future prescriber educated in Massachusetts receives mandatory opioid training. We brought together our 9 schools of social work to adopt core curriculum for our largest cadre of behavioral health clinicians.
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To better help law enforcement, we filed legislation last summer to crack down on drug trafficking and create stricter sentencing for anyone caught selling deadly drugs — including heroin or fentanyl — that lead to a user's death. On April 13th, I signed that into law.
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After more than two years of implementing new programs, collecting more data and maintaining an ongoing dialogue with our stakeholders, for the first time, opioid-related deaths have decreased. And to continue this progress, in November, we filed our second package: the CARE Act.
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The #MACAREAct builds upon the work of the STEP Act and offers a more targeted approach to expanding our educational efforts, preventing opioid misuse and addressing barriers to treatment and gaps in care. It is currently awaiting action from the Legislature.
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Since 2015, our admin has added 1100+ treatment beds, and over the next 5 years, we will add ~125 residential recovery beds each year with capacity to treat individuals with co-occurring disorders.
The CARE Act seeks to ensure these beds are put to good use & reach more people.
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Recovery coaches are essential to helping people get into treatment and maintain their sobriety, and the CARE Act calls for raising their profile and establishing credentialing standards. Our communities, the Legislature and insurance companies must recognize their importance.
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Hospital emergency departments are a first line of response for individuals experiencing a medical crisis related to substance use. Since 2011, opioid-related emergency department visits in Massachusetts have more than doubled.
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The bill we signed into law in 2016 required patients in the ER to be offered a substance use evaluation and connection to treatment within 24 hours of an overdose. Available data suggests 50-90% of patients decline this evaluation and leave the hospital without an assessment.
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Our legislation aims to fix this issue by creating three pathways for emergency departments to expand pathways for treatment for individuals.
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Massachusetts is seeing progress by sharpening the use of certain tools, like the prescription monitoring program, to increase accountability, improve information sharing and track prescriptions more closely.
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Still: Prescription opioids are highly addictive and dangerous when overprescribed. The CARE Act focuses on collecting more data, reducing fraud and better enforcing existing laws, starting with a mandate for all prescribers to convert to using secure, e-prescriptions by 2020.
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Some of the most haunting stories of addiction start with our own trusted physicians prescribing a highly addictive opioid in large quantities to ease pain after routine surgeries — such as getting your wisdom teeth removed.
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To better work with the dental and medical community to cut down on overprescribing, our bill establishes a commission to review appropriate prescribing practices for common procedures and ID recommended Rx for these acute conditions using prepackaging, or blister packs.
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Just as we work through our school systems to educate our kids, from elementary school through college, on the dangers of alcohol and drugs, it is imperative that we increase addiction prevention awareness for opioids through a structured approach for every school level.
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In our FY19 budget proposal, we included $5M for a new trust fund created by this bill that will support the expansion of education programs & the development of information systems to ID at-risk students, and enable the implementation of new school-based support models.
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We still have a lot of work to do, especially as the presence of fentanyl continues to rise. I am pleased that the "Fentanyl Fix," as well as the linking of state drug classifications to emergency federal drug scheduling, were in the bill I signed into law earlier this month.
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Today, I renew the call — echoed by the addiction treatment and recovery community — for the Legislature to act in these final days of the legislative session to pass the CARE Act before we lose the momentum we have gained in this crisis.
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