Opioid 'Scripts Down In Pierce County But ODs Remain Steady

TACOMA, WA — More than 211 million pain pills flowed into Pierce County over a seven-year period at the beginning of the opioid crisis, according to a new analysis of a Drug Enforcement Agency database that tracks prescription drugs.

The database was published July 16 — then updated July 21 — by The Washington Post and covers 2006 to 2012, a period when hundreds of thousands of Americans died of overdoses or developed opioid addictions due to the wide availability of pain pills. The data show that enough pills were shipped to Pierce County to supply every resident with just more than 38 pills per year.

Among Washington's 39 counties, Pierce was on the lower end, the report shows. Statistically, Clallam County, home to Port Angeles and Sequim, received the most pills per resident over those six years — enough for every person in the region to get 76 pills each year. Pend Orielle County in Eastern Washington — population 13,300 — got 6.65 million pills, enough for 73.9 pills per person, per year.

"These records provide an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic, which resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths during the seven-year time frame ending in 2012," The Post wrote in its report.

In 2006, overdoses caused by opioid pills began to climb in Pierce County. That year, 59 people died of pharmaceutical opioid overdoses, according to the state Department of Health. That number remained steady between 75 and 100 deaths per year through 2017, during which 99 deaths were reported. The latest data available is from 2017.

Between 2006 and 2012, Cost Less Prescriptions in Tacoma received roughly 7.3 million pills — the most among Pierce County pharmacies. The top five was rounded out by Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington (6.7 million), Purdy Cost Less Prescriptions in Gig Harbor (6.4 million), and two Walgreens pharmacies in Tacoma (5 million and 4.7 million, respectively).

Beginning in 2012, the state began publishing data on opioid prescriptions through the Prescription Monitoring Program. The PMP allows prescribing doctors to see if patients are using other controlled substances, partly in an effort to eliminate patients who "doctor shop" to get narcotics, according to the DOH.

Opioid prescriptions have lessened in Pierce County since the PMP went into place. During the first quarter of 2012, there were 103.4 opioid prescriptions per 1,000 people in the county. But by the fourth quarter of 2018, that was down to 78.3 prescriptions per 1,000 people.

As prescriptions for opioids dropped, however, people who had become addicted turned to alternatives like fentanyl and heroin. Heroin use began to spike in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and fentanyl overdoses exploded nationwide beginning in 2013.

In 2017, 16 Pierce County residents died after overdosing on fentanyl.

Meanwhile, prescriptions drugs that treat opioid use disorder have skyrocketed. There were about 5,000 Medicaid patients getting medication-assisted treatment (MAT) prescriptions in 2013 — but MAT prescriptions were up to 21,500 statewide in 2017.

Statewide between 2006 and 2012, 452,997,371 pain pills were shipped to Washington, according to The Post's analysis. More than half of those pills were made by the pharmaceutical company SpecGx LLC, which is a major manufacturer of oxycodone and hydrocodone.

For more information on how the opioid crisis has affected Pierce County, visit www.doh.wa.gov.

Washington Patch Editor Neal McNamara contributed to this report