Today, the “little black book” has been replaced by a powerful statewide database - an innovative data-sharing partnership between the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office and our state’s prescribers and pharmacists. The emergency departments’ patient-tracking books were a first step toward the type of data collection that every physician must rely upon in order to prevent prescription drug abuse. Pain management doctors, general practitioners and others can become the unwitting avenues by which addicted patients obtain their drugs. Addiction to oxycodone and other opiates has become a gateway to that most feared and deadly illegal opiate, heroin. Nationwide, abused prescription painkillers cause more overdose deaths each year than heroin and cocaine combined.
Until very recently, emergency room doctors in New Jersey used “little black books” to record patient visits in order to identify the small number of drug-addicted individuals who frequently visited their emergency rooms, not for legitimate medical needs, but to obtain and abuse narcotic painkillers.
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