SACRAMENTO — The voices of foster youth and their advocates overcame the powerful physicians lobby in the Capitol on Monday, as a bill to identify and investigate California doctors who overprescribe psychiatric drugs to traumatized foster children won a key Senate vote.

The unique legislation — part of a series of bills inspired by this newspaper’s investigative series “Drugging Our Kids” — mirrors efforts to stop reckless prescribing of painkillers.

Sen. Mike McGuire’s Senate Bill 1174, which passed on an 8-0 vote from the committee overseeing the state’s businesses and professions, would give the California Medical Board greater authority to crack down on doctors who engage in “repeated acts of clearly excessive prescribing, furnishing or administering psychotropic medications to a minor” without medical justification.

California’s foster care system has come to rely on powerful antipsychotic drugs to sedate troubled teens, the newspaper’s investigation revealed. But while a series of bills passed last year instituted many new measures to curb the practice, the laws did nothing to target the source of the drugs: the doctors who prescribe them.

“The vast majority of medical professionals are doing their job well, but as in any industry there are going to be outliers, and medical professionals are no different,” said McGuire, D-Healdsburg, whose bill now heads to the Senate Appropriations Committee. “And if there is an outlier, it could cost someone their life, or cause permanent damage for a child.”

Lobbyists for the California Medical Association, the California Psychiatric Association and the California Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry oppose McGuire’s bill, unless it is watered down to include an “education-first” rather than an “enforcement-first” approach.

They argue that the additional oversight will drive physicians from working with foster children and “add another bureaucratic layer to a process that is already highly regulated.”

Under McGuire’s bill, the medical board would monitor physicians through quarterly reports of prescription claims that would not reveal patient names, but rather the prescribers’ practices. Prescribing to very young children, high dosages of medications, and the use of multiple psychotropic medications at once could be grounds for investigation under the bill.

While physicians have due process rights to defend themselves, ultimately the worst offenders could lose their licenses. The new scrutiny of psychotropic prescribing is similar in some ways to curbs on the overuse of pain medications, now tracked by the state Attorney General’s Office.

The California Medical Association’s Stuart Thompson testified Monday that his group has no problem with the bill’s data-sharing provisions between state health officials and the medical board. “But what we do have a problem with is, this is going to be a retroactive look at prescribing practices.” Thompson proposed that instead of trained state investigators, an “ad hoc committee” should review physician care of foster children.

However, Cal State East Bay student Tisha Ortiz, a 23-year-old former foster youth, said more serious review is urgently needed. Testifying before state senators, Ortiz said as a young teen she took as many as 12 pills a day in foster care, including a combination of an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, an anti-anxiety medication and a mood stabilizer.

It left her listless, overweight and suffering from tics. The bill “will help identify doctors who are too quick to prescribe medications and who are overreliant on them,” she said, and ensure that prescribers “distinguish between behavioral issues and mental illnesses.”

McGuire’s bill expands on a series of laws passed last year to restrict the excessive use of psychotropic drugs in the foster care system, after the newspaper’s investigation. The series found almost 1 in 4 foster teens on mind-altering medications, which have serious side effects.

Under a second pending bill, authored by Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, counties would be required to submit a local plan each year detailing mental health services available to children in foster care and the juvenile justice system. The plans would be reviewed by quality-control experts, and counties found lacking would be subject to sanctions, including the withholding of state and federal funds.

Both bills are sponsored by the National Center for Youth Law, which was successful in passing a package of reform bills last year. Beall’s Senate Bill 1291 passed a key Senate committee last week.

With McGuire’s bill now moving toward the Senate floor, the senator said he is hopeful that foster children will receive the same protection of other California patients.

His office found that from 2014 to 2015, more than 8,000 medical board complaints were filed, but not a single one came from a parent or advocate for a foster child.

“These kids don’t have anyone standing up for them, and they don’t have a voice, and they’re suffering the consequences,” he said.

Contact Karen de Sá at 408-920-5781.