Viewpoints: Program aims to reduce teenage prescription drug abuse

Sacramento Bee

The Bee recently featured articles on the problem of prescription drug abuse and the need to talk with teens. While still a public menace, illicit substances like heroin and cocaine have taken a back seat to the abuse of legal prescription medications. Many of these medications when misused or altered in some way – melted, pulverized, mixed with some other substance, injected into blood vessels – are just as addictive as many illicit drugs and can have at least as harmful side effects and morbidity. Even worse, prescription drugs are the second most common cause of accidental death in the United States.

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Feds sue landlord of Berkeley marijuana dispensary

Fresno Bee

The federal government is suing Berkeley's largest medical marijuana outlet with the goal of seizing the property from its landlord. The Contra Costa Times reports the suit accuses Berkeley Patients Group of breaking federal drug laws by allowing the sale of marijuana. It claims landlord Nahla Droubi is subject to seizure of her property.

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Medicare charges vary widely at California hospitals, new data show

Los Angeles Times

Federal officials are shedding new light on how much hospital bills vary across Southern California and the rest of the country. Medicare released pricing information Wednesday for more than 3,300 U.S. hospitals on the top 100 procedures and treatments in 2011. The federal health program for seniors and private insurers only pays a fraction of these billed charges.

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Wal-Mart Could Transform Health Care. But Does it Want to?

California Healthline

"Why is Wal-Mart speaking at a health care summit?" the company's vice president for health and wellness, Marcus Osborne, rhetorically offered up at a conference back in January. "Wal-Mart's in retail, we're not in health care." But as analysts, researchers, and other experts who spoke with "Road to Reform" took care to point out, Wal-Mart is in health care, and getting further entrenched by the year.  In the past six months alone, Wal-Mart launched a major contracting initiative with half-a-dozen major hospitals, and dropped hints -- since retracted -- that the company is exploring new services like a health insurance exchange.

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Steinberg Releases Plan to Boost Mental Health Care in California

California Healthline

On Tuesday, California Senate Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) released a proposal that aims to improve mental health services in the state and reduce the number of patients with mental illnesses in prisons and hospitals, the Sacramento Bee's "Capitol Alert" reports. Background: Steinberg said he was motived to develop the proposal by "heart-breaking and often tragic" situations that involve individuals with mental illnesses.

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Assembly speaker to push for new 'rainy-day fund' to help budget

Sacramento Bee

Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez is proposing a new state spending restriction that would set aside money from capital gains taxes in good years to help the state through economic downturns. The proposed rainy-day fund would go on next year's ballot, replacing a constitutional amendment already on the ballot that unions strongly oppose.

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Solving the Prescription Drug Misuse Tragedy

Huffington Post (Blog)

An addiction scientist named Tom McLellan told me that he was once visiting one of America's top colleges, sitting in the office of the school's president, who was bemoaning the fact that he was losing a student or two a year to drug overdoses. Indeed, there's been a dramatic up-tick - triple the number from four years ago - in the number of college-age kids showing up in the nation's emergency rooms for overdoses on pain pills. In fact, these days, the number-one killer of America's young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 isn't car accidents. It's overdoses. And the majority of those are ODs on prescription medications.

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