By Nathan Prewett
For the Tribune
TRUSSVILLE — Many in the Trussville community are familiar with the story of Will Bright, a young man who died in 2012 of a drug overdose. His parents, Bill and Lisa Bright, later founded the Will Bright Foundation in the hopes of helping recovering addicts start again in life and try to prevent other tragedies from happening.
Recently they were afforded an opportunity to progress their mission by flying to Washington D.C. where they spoke to politicians on legislation regarding opioid use.
Lisa Bright said that she and her husband were contacted by a lobbying group pushing for more non-opioid medication choices for surgery. On June 12-13, they flew to Washington D.C. to speak with state congressmen and senators on the legislation. Among them was Congressman Gary Palmer.
“He was very attuned to a lot of the different bills trying to be passed this summer or at least get to the senate,” Bright said. “They bundle a lot of bills together before they can get it to the senate. We had a very good conversation with him. He is very much on board with the opioid crisis and feels like something has got to be done through the government.”
She learned that Senator Doug Jones is working on a bill to have more job readiness programs for recovering addicts. It has not yet been voted on but Bright voiced her support for the bill.
“There are a lot of bills for the opioid crisis,” Bright said. “They were trying to gather a panel of people to go before congressmen and senators to be able to express how opioids have affected their family and life. Us at the Will Bright Foundation, we were the parents perspective on how the use of opioids which turns to heroin use when you can’t get them anymore.”
Bright said that the panel addressed what she said was the over-prescribing of opioids, a concern that has been raised by BlueCross BlueShield of Alabama. The issue of opioid prescription has led to a lawsuit by Attorney General Steve Marshall against Purdu Pharma, a pharmaceutical manufacturing company. The lawsuit was joined by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in March.
On the panel in Washington D.C. was an oral surgeon who discussed how people in his profession are not trained in writing prescriptions. Another was a lawyer that represented grandparents whose children were addicts. In these cases, grandparents were adopting their grandchildren due to their parents’ situation as addicts.
“We were a representative for Alabama,” Bright said. “So we went to our congressmen and senators and spoke to them on what we were standing for as far as encouraging legislation to be passed for more options covered by insurance instead of an easily written opioid prescription.”
Bright said that she was able to learn about some of the goings on in Washington D.C. as bills are introduced and start the journey towards being made laws.
“It was a great opportunity to go up there,” she said. “And it was very interesting to see how things get done and makes you realize how long it takes to get something accomplished.”
She hopes that her talks with the state politicians will bring awareness of opioid prescription that will lead to action on a national and local level.
“The hope is that they’ll get a hold of how the drugs are made,” she said. “This particular drug, Oxycodone, was made for cancer patients. It was made for people who have had a rotator cuff surgery. It’s highly addictive and in its use it would probably be fine but the way that it’s over-prescribed – Alabama is the number one state in prescribing opioids in the country and so that’s got to be address federally and locally.”
“There has to be some legislation locally to combat that because it’s killing our young people and they say one of the fastest growing addictions are with people in Medicare aid for 55 to 65 plus (years old) because they’re having joint replacement and they’re getting addicted to opioids, so I hope that’s what they’re able to combat, to be able to do something about how prescriptions are written, how frequently they’re written and to push these pharmaceutical companies to not generate these drugs that are so highly addictive.”
To learn more about the Will Bright Foundation, visit www.willbrightfoundation.com.