JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – As the 2016 legislative session came to a close Friday, it was clear Missouri will remain the only state in the country without a prescription drug monitoring program.



KOLR10 News has examined heroin and opiate addiction this month in its Courageous Conversations series, and has tracked whether Missouri would join the other 49 states in setting up a database.



The monitoring programs, or “PDMP’s,” allow medical professionals to determine whether someone may be shopping around for narcotics.



“I’m extremely disappointed; I don’t have words for how disappointed I am,” said Rep. Holly Rehder, R-Sikeston.



The road to create a prescription drug monitoring program in Missouri has been bumpy for Rehder, just like the road to recovery was for her now 30-year-old daughter.



“Right now we have a law enforcement type program to where you wait till you get into trouble or you get busted doctor shopping,” Rehder said.



Rehder’s daughter got hooked on pain pills at age 17.



She believes if Missouri had a PDMP, doctors might have been able to cut off the access her daughter and dealers had to drugs.



“This is a health epidemic, this is sweeping the nation,” Rehder said. “And the fact that we’re in the hold, it’s just shameful.”



Sen. Rob Schaaf, R-St. Joseph, is a doctor and once again threatened to filibuster the proposal this year.



KOLR10 News has reached out more than a half dozen times to the senator’s staff in the past two weeks, and he was not made available for an interview over the telephone or when KOLR10 visited his Capitol office.



Schaaf told proponents he would not support the bill unless it went to a vote of the people with his ballot language. The senator has opposed the program in the past due to concerns with patient privacy.



“The ballot language is huge because as you know ballot language can be very persuasive one way or another, which what we don’t want is language that would urge a no vote, which is what Dr. Schaaf wanted,” Rehder said.



St. Louis County is in the process of developing its own prescription drug monitoring program.



Rehder said since she cannot get the proposal through the legislature, she will be working to help local governments who are not willing to wait.



“We’re not going to op for the good bill that’s working across all the other states and were going to go ahead and allow piecemeal across the state of Missouri, but were going to have PDMP’s in Missouri.”



“When 49 other states have done it, my Missouri common sense tells me we are the problem,” said U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill in a hearing related to opiate addiction in Jefferson City earlier this year. “Obviously, if I could wave a magic wand and get a certain senator locked in a closet, we can get this done in Missouri.”

Schaff had asked that the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs administer the program and view the data, while proponents argued doctors could handle the data.

