By Associated Press
Washington, DC – The White House drug czar called Thursday for cooperation among educators, law enforcement and others to combat the nation's growing abuse of prescription pills.
Gil Kerlikowske briefed the newly formed Congressional Caucus on Prescription Pill Abuse on Thursday about his findings from a tour of some of the hardest hit communities, including some in Kentucky.
"Our collaborative approach to reducing this public health threat requires all of us to work," to he said.
Kerlikowske, a proponent of state-run prescription monitoring programs, also encouraged local authorities to set up disposal sites for people to empty their medicine cabinets of unused prescriptions.
"For more than a decade, southern and eastern Kentucky has been ground-zero for the abuse of prescription medication, and the misuse of these otherwise life-saving drugs has reached an epidemic-level nationwide," Republican U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky, who is co-chairman of the caucus, said in a statement.
Caucus co-chairwoman U.S. Rep. Mary Bono Mack said recent arrests in Florida have focused attention on the life-and-death struggle of prescription pill addicts.
Bono Mack, chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade, said she intends to hold public hearings in the next month on prescription pill abuse.
"Few things are more destructive," she said. "Addiction continues to be a serious and rapidly escalating problem across America."
Kerlikowske spent three days in Kentucky last month touring communities that have been dealing with widespread painkiller abuse.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had encouraged Kerlikowske in hopes of raising public awareness nationally of issues facing a region where more people die from drugs than car crashes. McConnell said "an astonishingly high" 82 Kentuckians die each month to overdoses.
Kerlikowske said he was impressed by the collaboration he saw between public and private sectors in combating the problem.
"Drug abuse threatens everything that is best about our country," McConnell said in a statement Thursday. "It turns productive citizens into hopeless addicts, destroys the bonds between family members, and brings violence into our schools and communities. We must do everything we can to end the plague of drug abuse."