St. Joseph News-Press, April 18
Monitor prescription sales in state:
Law enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges in Northwest Missouri well understand the threat posed by illegal drug use. So do medical professionals and our social welfare workers.
News reports have documented the rise in heroin-related crimes and the continuing toll that can be attributed to methamphetamine addiction. Both of these drugs contribute to serious health issues, including premature death; criminal actions to support the drug habit; and countless families torn apart by destructive behaviors.
And consider this: Prescription drug abuse is an even bigger problem, linked to 16,000 deaths a year in the United States.
“One of the things that we are seeing as a nationwide trend is that a lot of people are using prescription medication and diverting it for illegal use,” says Capt. Mike Donaldson with the Buchanan County Drug Strike Force. “It is super destructive, and is described as synthetic heroin.”
We encourage area citizens concerned for their communities to support legislative proposals for a prescription drug monitoring program that would allow Missouri authorities to electronically analyze drug purchases and detect when prescriptions are being abused.
Examples of this criminal behavior include obtaining prescriptions from more than one doctor, obtaining prescribed medications from more than one pharmacy, and forgery of prescriptions.
Shockingly, Missouri is the only state not to have an electronic prescription drug monitoring program. This year’s proposal, House Bill 1133, passed the House in February but now is languishing in a Senate committee and is given little chance of passage.
A key opinion leader on this issue, state Sen. Rob Schaaf, R-St. Joseph, opposes this legislation on privacy grounds, and his use of the legislative process has contributed to stopping it from becoming law. He has said he considers it a dead issue for this year.
This is unfortunate. We think the privacy concern, if justified at all, is overblown. Further, it is out of proportion to the good that could come of this legislation.
Law-abiding citizens in Missouri - as in every other state of the union - understand the potential benefits that would flow from improved tracking of prescription drug sales.
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The Washington Missourian, April 19
Best they could get:
Lawmakers in both chambers of the Missouri General Assembly have passed bills banning the sales of electronic nicotine delivery devices to minors.
The bills would prohibit the sales of electronic cigarettes, or e-cigs, as they are commonly known, to those under the age of 18. Current law allows those products to be purchased by anyone.
E-cigs are battery-powered devices used to heat a liquid nicotine solution and create vapor that is inhaled. The use of the sleek, smokeless devices, especially among teenagers, is increasing rapidly here and across the country.
E-cigarette use among U.S. high school students more than doubled from 4.7 percent in 2011 to 10 percent in 2012, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Youth Tobacco Survey.
That trend has doctors and public health officials worried. E-cigs are touted as a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products but they are not without health risks.
Those who use the devices are still ingesting nicotine which is a highly addictive stimulant that can cause a number of other health risks.
The city of Washington, Mo., cited some of those risks in the no-smoking ordinance it passed last year which also bans the use of e-cigarettes.
One of the main concerns regarding e-cigs is their potential to be a gateway drug, with nicotine addiction leading to more tobacco use. The same CDC survey suggested at least 160,000 students who had never tried conventional cigarettes tried e-cigs.
Given those concerns, the Legislature took prudent action even though the votes did not come without some turbulence.
Lawmakers from both parties objected that the bills didn’t go far enough because both exempted e-cigarettes from the state’s 17-cent per pack cigarette tax and stated they could not be regulated as tobacco products.
They accused the sponsors of the bills of caving into the tobacco lobbyists whose clients are gobbling up e-cig companies, injecting millions of dollars into the market and banking on a bright future for the devices.
Proponents of the bills pleaded reality. Subjecting e-cigs to regulation and taxes would have killed the bills’ chances of passage.
Missouri has the lowest cigarette taxes in the country and a strong bias against government regulation. Keeping e-cigs out of the hands of minors was the best they were going to get.
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Jefferson City News Tribune, April 21
Motivated to improve or meddle?:
“Little Jack Horner sat in a corner,
“Eating a Christmas pie;
“He put in his thumb,
“And pulled out a plum,
“And said, “What a good boy am I!’”
Like the nursery rhyme character, Missouri lawmakers this session are putting their thumb print on ongoing programs - in some cases, after four years of inattention.
Recent examples include actions to change an existing farm-to-school program and Common Core education standards.
Since 2010, University of Missouri Extension has operated a program to provide locally grown food to schools and other institutions. The program is funded largely by a federal grant.
Lawmakers this session are considering a separate state policy to establish and operate a farm-to-school program. As proposed, the state operation would not necessarily serve as a conduit for the federal money.
Also in 2010, Common Core was adopted by Missouri’s State Board of Education after the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers worked to develop more rigorous standards for math and English curricula in the schools nationwide.
Although many school districts - including Jefferson City - are nearing full implementation, those preparations may be undone by lawmakers this session.
Common Core proponents view legislative intervention as belated, unnecessary and costly. Why, they wonder, have lawmakers paid scant attention to Common Core for the past four years?
Some lawmakers say the program was not publicly vetted, that Gov. Jay Nixon committed Missouri to it with no input from lawmakers or the general public and that no one was told about it.
Although Common Core is not a federal initiative, it is supported by President Obama and has attracted criticism for its national scope.
That criticism has gotten the attention of lawmakers, who recently advanced legislation to revoke Common Core and replace it with yet-to-be-determined state standards.
The question arises: Are lawmakers being responsible or egotistical?
Do they believe they can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these programs?
Or is this legislative hubris - an egotistical belief they must stick their thumbs in every state operation so they can boast - “what a good legislator am I”?
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 18
Missourians support ethics reform. Why won’t Legislature act?:
Occasionally, we wish we weren’t so prescient. Last December, for example, as the 2014 legislative session was getting ready to start, we said this about the prospects of meaningful ethics reform being passed:
“It’s hard to believe that lawmakers who benefit from sleazy ethics and campaign finance laws can summon the integrity to enact serious reform. Ultimately, voters probably will have to do it for them by passing a ballot measure.”
You rarely lose any money betting against good government in the Legislature.
Despite many sincere and meaningful bills from both Democrats and Republicans being filed to reduce the pernicious influence of money in the legislative process, legislation to undo Missouri’s status as the only state in the nation with no limits on either lobbyist gifts or campaign donations appears stuck in mud.
A Senate debate … over a proposal from Sen. Brad Lager, R-Savannah, intended to reduce lobbyist gifts and end the revolving door between lawmaking and lobbying, gave a strong indication that state lawmakers just don’t have the courage to police themselves.
Some still want their free lunches and dinners. Others, like Mr. Lager, want to continue collecting six-figure checks from mostly anonymous donors. Some, knowing their time in the Legislature is almost up, don’t want to give up the possibility of sliding into a lobbyist gig or a gubernatorial appointment.
The sweet lure of quick cash is hard to ignore.
Here’s what should also be hard for those reticent lawmakers to ignore: Missourians want ethics reform. Badly.
A new poll conducted by The Wickers Group on behalf of the Missouri Liberty Project shows broad-based support, among Democrats, Republicans and independents, for serious ethics reform in the Show-Me State. The poll, conducted in March among likely general election voters, found that between 70 and 80 percent of likely voters supported five different elements of ethics reform:
- Banning free tickets from lobbyists for professional or college sporting events, hunting and fishing trips and golf outings.
- Limiting the number of meals lawmakers can accept from lobbyists.
- Barring lawmakers’ staff from working as paid political consultants.
- Requiring lawmakers to wait several years after retiring before becoming lobbyists.
- Creating a new unit in the attorney general’s office to fight abuse and corruption in state government.
In each question, the support was highest among Democrats, but similarly high among both Republicans and independents.
A huge majority of Missourians support ethics reform. It ought to scare lawmakers unwilling to deal with the problem themselves; if a private group like the Missouri Liberty Project is willing to spend money polling on the issue, it’s an indication that ethics reform will be eventually coming to a Missouri ballot.
Keep in mind, the Liberty Project is run by Josh Hawley, a conservative University of Missouri law professor who is involved in the Hobby Lobby lawsuit against contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. We don’t agree with him much. And we would point out that in using a 502-c-4 to obscure his organization’s funding (he would not tell us who funds the Missouri Liberty Project), he is part of the greater problem in national politics.
Dark money is allowing a select rich few to control the nation’s political system with little to no transparency. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong on ethics.
He rightly, if ironically, points out that as lawmakers are improperly influenced by money, there is a real deleterious effect on the political system.
“It’s about the right to participate in one’s government,” Mr. Hawley told us. “It’s a vital part of what it means to be free.”
Missourians want ethics reform because they want to believe in their government again. That is true of liberals and conservatives, city-dwellers and farmers, Democrats, Republicans, and everybody in between.
What is the Missouri Legislature waiting for?
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