One of the greatest problems facing our society today is drug abuse. Unfortunately, a significant percentage of the drugs in circulation that are being abused are prescription narcotic drugs obtained legitimately from physicians' offices. These prescription narcotics are received and sold in the underground market illegally and used for by people other than the patient for whom it was prescribed. This is diversion.

In recent years, the problem of diversion has taken extraordinary magnitude involving multiple medications in multiple categories within the narcotic class. One of the problems experienced by many pain management practices across the country is that some states do not have a monitoring device that checks on the prescription pattern for the patient, resulting in the patient not being monitored regarding the use of prescribed narcotic medications. As a consequence, no reliable or easily available tracking system exists. However, some states have tracking systems, some of which are made available to the physicians and others in law enforcement, and there is no national uniform system in place or one that allows the states to communicate between one another within a central data pool. Because of this, a patient can come in to Massachusetts and see a physician then cross over to Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island or New York to see another physician and obtain prescription narcotics in large quantities, which are then sold in the black market illegally.

The legislation which The American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) has been lobbying for in Congress actively is called NASPER. NASPER is attempting to bring a joint database into existence that all of the states in the federation can be able to pool their data into and allow physicians to be able to monitor the narcotic prescription usage of an individual patient through a system that allows the physician to have personal identification numbers and access into the national system (PIN) electronically and be able to instantly evaluate a patient for a pattern of abuse or diversion.

You can help by writing your congressman in Washington, DC, Senators and House of Representatives, and asking for them to support NASPER so that it could be passed into legislation to help curb this problem. Kindly see the NASPER website at www.nasper.org. Sample letters are provided in this website as well.