What do you do when one purported danger to public health is pitted against another? How do you determine which is the greater threat?
The best answer would seem to be to proceed with caution. Make sure all the angles are considered.
The Tennessee Senate didn’t seem to be concerned, however, when it voted 29-1 Thursday for a bill favored by pharmacists but opposed by drug safety advocates. There wasn’t a word of dissent, The Tennessean in Nashville reported.
The House Health Committee has cleared a companion measure for a floor vote in that chamber.
The proposed law, pushed by Tennessee Pharmacists Association, would allow hospitals and other health care providers to obtain compound drugs “not commercially available” without requiring a doctor’s prescription in advance.
A late amendment to the Senate version would exempt hospitals from a requirement to file quarterly reports with the state listing the volume of drugs they have produced.
Drug shortages pose a serious public health danger, one senator who is a pharmacist said. “It is not possible to know the name of the patient before the medical event occurs, but the providers do know the drugs they need,” he told fellow senators.
But a spokesman for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, said the measure would “undermine public safety” and allow “large-scale production of drugs that have not been approved by the FDA nor manufactured according to the high safety and quality standards that patients in this country expect.”
The president of the National Research Center for Women & Families, a Washington-based nonprofit, said the bill aggravates the problem of unsafe pharmaceuticals.
Current Tennessee law requires patient-specific prescriptions for compounding of drugs, but that law hasn’t been enforced. If it had been, the state pharmacists’ group president said, persistent drug shortages would have been worse.
The pharmacists’ organization has more clout with the legislature than outside advocacy groups, and rightly so. But lawmakers shouldn’t just sweep objections under the rug. In the name of public safety, they should at least confront openly the concerns that have been raised.
The best answer would seem to be to proceed with caution. Make sure all the angles are considered.
The Tennessee Senate didn’t seem to be concerned, however, when it voted 29-1 Thursday for a bill favored by pharmacists but opposed by drug safety advocates. There wasn’t a word of dissent, The Tennessean in Nashville reported.
The House Health Committee has cleared a companion measure for a floor vote in that chamber.
The proposed law, pushed by Tennessee Pharmacists Association, would allow hospitals and other health care providers to obtain compound drugs “not commercially available” without requiring a doctor’s prescription in advance.
A late amendment to the Senate version would exempt hospitals from a requirement to file quarterly reports with the state listing the volume of drugs they have produced.
Drug shortages pose a serious public health danger, one senator who is a pharmacist said. “It is not possible to know the name of the patient before the medical event occurs, but the providers do know the drugs they need,” he told fellow senators.
But a spokesman for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, said the measure would “undermine public safety” and allow “large-scale production of drugs that have not been approved by the FDA nor manufactured according to the high safety and quality standards that patients in this country expect.”
The president of the National Research Center for Women & Families, a Washington-based nonprofit, said the bill aggravates the problem of unsafe pharmaceuticals.
Current Tennessee law requires patient-specific prescriptions for compounding of drugs, but that law hasn’t been enforced. If it had been, the state pharmacists’ group president said, persistent drug shortages would have been worse.
The pharmacists’ organization has more clout with the legislature than outside advocacy groups, and rightly so. But lawmakers shouldn’t just sweep objections under the rug. In the name of public safety, they should at least confront openly the concerns that have been raised.
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