In a bit of good news, a team from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health says that two laws passed by the state of Florida have actually helped to reduce opioid prescriptions and use.

The state implemented a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) which tracks patients names, amounts prescribed, dates and for which drug so that doctors can keep a closer eye on who might be abusing these drugs. The state also passed pill mill laws to try and crack down on offices that were a bit loose on writing prescriptions for these dangerous drugs. Now clinics must be registered and physician-owned.

The researchers looked at the effect on overall opioid use and prescriptions for the year before the changes were in place and the first year after these changes. They compared their results to Georgia, a neighboring state who did not have comparable programs at the time, to see if their results were significant. In that first year, Florida’s opioid prescriptions were reduced by 1.4 percent and the volume fell 2.5 percent. That doesn’t sound like a lot percentage-wise but that equates to about 750,000 pills each month. The amount of pills per prescription also declined 5.6 percent. Researchers said that declines came from the heaviest prescribers and users.

Before these measures were enacted in Florida, the state was looking at a rapid rise in overdose deaths. Between 2003-2009 prescription drug overdoses jumped by 80 percent.

A professor at the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management, Lainie Rutkow, says that the results of this study make the case for “policy solutions to the prescription drug epidemic”.

Currently every state has a PDMP and some regulate clinics, but maybe this study will encourage more states to start looking at how pain medications are distributed and from where. The results from Florida are small decreases for now but if it could save a person’s life, every improvement counts.