New CDC Report on Opiods

Today's guest post is by The Hon. David Langham who is the Deputy Chief Judge of Compensation Claims for the Florida Office of Judges of Compensation Claims and Division of Administrative Hearings flojcc.blogspot.com

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently issued a report on opiod painkillers. It concludes that prescriptions for opiods remain more common in the United States than anywhere else in the world. In 2012 there were 259 million prescriptions written for painkillers in this country. The report concludes this is "enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills." (In the interest of full disclosure, I did not get mine, so someone must have gotten my share).

Drug overdose and interaction remains a problem in this country. According to the CDC "deaths from drug overdose have been rising steadily over the past two decades." Each day, "113 people die as a result of drug overdose and another 6,748 are treated in emergency departments for the misuse or abuse of drugs." The CDC says that 9 of 10 "poisoning deaths are caused by drugs."

The report quantifies the number of prescriptions per 100 people in each state (in parenthesis that follow). The five states with the most opiod prescriptions were Alabama (143), Kentucky (128), Oklahoma (128), Tennessee (143), and West Virginia (138). These are labelled as the "highest" states in the study. The five states labelled the "lowest" volume were California (57), Hawaii (52), Minnesota (62), New Jersey (63) and New York (60).

Florida is in the large group of 21 states categorized as "below average" in the study, with 73 prescriptions per 100...

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Its Déjà Vu All Over Again

Today's post is shared from Judge David Langham and I would encourage to read his blog at: http://flojcc.blogspot.com/ David Langham is the Deputy Chief Judge of Compensation Claims for the Florida Office of Judges of Compensation Claims and Division of Administrative Hearings.  Zohydro is in the news yet again. This month the new medication will become available. Its manufacturer says it will market this only to a select few physicians whose experience with pain will assure their discretion and restraint in distributing this strong pain killer. In November, I noted the approval of this new Opiod formulation, and in December, I wrote when over half the nation’s attorneys general wrote to the FDA urging that the approval receive greater scrutiny and perhaps reconsideration (Zohydro in the News Again). Well, as Yogi Bera once said “its déjà vu all over again.” Zohydro is back in the news at the end of February. Now, an “activist” group is questioning the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)and has released a letter it sent to the FDA in late February. The group is called “Fed Up!” and their points are interesting. They note that Zohydro is being marketed in the “midst of a severe drug addiction epidemic.” They note that Zohydro “will kill people as soon as it is released.” Dr. Andrew Kolodny calls it “a whopping dose of hydrocodone packed in...

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  Florida Workers' Compensation FIlings Continue to Decrease
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• Bill Creating Clear Guidelines in Dispensing of Opiod Medications Introduced in New Jersey Senate

Florida Workers' Compensation Fillings Continue to Decrease

The national trend of far fewer workers' compensation claims is reflected in recent Florida statistics. One must look beyond the statistics and evaluate whether claims are not being filed because they have been regulatorily or statutorily been barred; whether there has been a major decrease in riskier jobs; whether the workplace is actually becoming safer; or whether lawyers are not taking the claims to adjudication because they go uncompensated for their efforts. Perhaps a combination of all. If the claims are not being filing as work related compensable events, where are benefits being sought. One certain path is Medicare and Medicare and Social Security Disability Benefits, especially those with catastrophic injuries.  Today's post is shared from Judge David Langham and I would encourage to read his entire blog post on his site at: http://flojcc.blogspot.com/2013/10/annual-reort-installment-petition.html David Langham is the Deputy Chief Judge of Compensation Claims for the Florida Office of Judges of Compensation Claims and Division of Administrative Hearings. 

"Petition filings and new case filings continued to decline last year. Remember, the Florida Office of Judges of Compensation Claims (OJCC)(and the rest of the state) runs on a fiscal year, which begins each July 1 and concludes the following June 30. So, fiscal 2013 ended last summer, and the OJCC has been compiling and preparing statistics and measures since then. It is a long process that includes verification of data that our district staff has entered into the database through the year.

"In 2012-13, 58,041 PFB were filed. In 1995-96 the total PFB filing was 56,298. So, after a significant increase in litigation following the 1994 reforms, PFB volumes are approaching the pre-reform volumes. This is an imperfect comparison. Before the 1993 reforms, "claims" were the operative pleading for identifying the dispute, and jurisdiction of this Office over such disputes was effected by filing an "application for hearing" regarding the claim. With this significant change in 1993, it is difficult to compare filing volumes to periods before 1993. 

Read the post in its entirety by clicking here.

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