Over the past two and half weeks, the New Hampshire legislature has passed two new bills to address drug diversion.

The history of these bills began in the spring of 2012 when my partner and I noted that we had two patients with acute hepatitis C under our care. Neither of us had seen acute hepatitis C in our practices since it usually presents as a chronic disease. The common thread was our cardiac catheterization lab. We reported these immediately which began the cascade of events eventually resulting in identification of 10,000 patients at risk nationwide from 17 hospitals. At our hospital, there were 32 cases that resulted from drug diversion by a medical technician named David Kwiatkowski.

I have had the dual advantage of being a member of the state wide Drug Diversion Task Force, a working group that arose following this episode, as well as being elected to the New Hampshire State Legislature House of Representatives in the same year. Two pieces of legislation had been introduced to address the problem of drug diversion as a response to this incident. I took these pieces of legislation, with full support from their sponsor, to the Task Force. With all of the major stakeholders participating and with the hard work of legislative subcommittees, we were able to revise these two pieces of legislation to address the problems identified by our Department of Health and Human Services as a result of its investigation of the outbreak.
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