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It is awesome that New Mexico is considering harm reduction approaches.  But on the other hand, New Mexico is also considering a new senate bill, SB 159, which will potentially adversely affect both chronic and acute pain sufferers.  The bill, among other things, limits supplies of pain medications from 30 days to 7 days for ill-defined "acute" conditions and, more importantly, prohibits doctors from issuing refills on such medicines as the current system allows.  Instead, the doctor is allowed to write multiple prescriptions on the same visit.  The net result will be that doctors will be reticent about doing so (for fear of diversion, etc), and patients will have to schedule additional unnecessary visits to get their pain-related issues treated adequately.  This will have the greatest impact on the state's poor, who will be burdened with the costs of additional doctor consultations, etc.

The ostensible purpose of SB 159 is to reduce the incidence of heroin-related deaths, a drug which is already illegal and for possession of which, there are already stiff penalties on the books.  There is no evidence that restricting the availability of medicines for legitimate acute and chronic pain sufferers will in anyway reduce heroin-related deaths, especially since it will have no effect on the heroin supply within the state, except maybe to lead to a slight increase in demand as supplies of illegally-diverted substitutes become less widely available to recreational users.

It is time to re-evaluate current approaches about drug use and addiction, which have failed in every respect to curtail drug-related problems.  From a psychological standpoint, limiting or restricting availability of certain substances which are in high demand by addicts, only fuels their obsessive behaviors and leads to more problems with addiction and related issues.  Safe injection sites and harm reduction should be the goal in any effective program designed to combat social problems caused by overuse of drugs.  Thus, while I applaud New Mexico on this front, it needs to bring its other policies in line with the concept of harm reduction so that there is internal consistency in how it deals with the issue of drug misuse and overuse.