Published: January 08, 2009 12:32 am      

University of Charleston to soon open drug abuse prevention outpatient clinic

CHARLESTON — For people grappling with substance abuse, basic health care can be fraught with worry: over-the-counter cough medicine can have relapse-triggering amounts of alcohol, and visits to the dentist are hazardous if they include narcotic painkillers.

A new outpatient clinic at the University of Charleston, likely the first of its kind in the state, hopes to make those anxious decisions easier when it opens later this month.

The vision for the free clinic is a one-stop information center for patients and practitioners, where issues like medication side effects and appropriate pain treatment for recovering addicts can be addressed.

The latter can be an especially hard question, with doctors worried about prescribing to addicts and patients resigning themselves to severe pain to avoid the chance of relapse. The abuse of opioid painkillers like oxycodone, hydrocodone and methadone, is a nationwide problem, but is particularly acute in Appalachia.

“It’s actually unethical not to treat people appropriately, but the question is, what’s the best treatment for someone with an addiction?,” said Michael O’Neil, the pharmacy professor who will oversee the clinic and the chairman of the state Controlled Substance Advisory Board.

After being examined, patients will be given wallet-sized cards telling them what kind of medication or treatment is appropriate for certain types of pain, without putting them at risk of slipping back into addiction.

The clinic will also work with people frustrated by side effects of prescription medicine, and with those who want to know what types of drugs are safer for recovering addicts.

O’Neil also sees the clinic as a way to educate physicians, dentists and other prescribers on some of the best practices for providing routine medical care to people with addictions.

“That’s probably one of the biggest problems we have, is lack of education among providers,” O’Neil said. “If you start educating the physicians and the dentists, they can affect a lot of people.”

According to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, four of the five states where hydrocodone had the highest per capita distribution in 2006 were in Appalachia — Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and Alabama. Tennessee is also in the top five for oxycodone distribution, and Alabama ranks in the top 10 for methadone prescriptions.

With doctors legitimately prescribing those drugs more, there have also been rises in illicit use and fatal overdoses.

“There’s more of it around,” said Anne McGee, director of the Cabell County Substance Abuse Prevention Partnership. “With kids especially, it’s about access. What’s available?”

McGee is organizing the annual Cabell County drug abuse prevention summit on Thursday, which this year will be devoted to prescription drugs. As a gauge of the issue’s gravity, the conference will have not only local participation, but a scheduled address from Frances Harding, director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse Prevention.

Last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study showing that 93 percent of West Virginia’s 295 unintentional overdose deaths in 2006 involved opioid painkillers.