PORT HADLOCK – The Jefferson County jail’s inmate prescription drug budget is on a track to burst before the year’s end.
Not only are jail inmates are popping prescription pills at an alarming rate, but also drug prices have skyrocketed in recent years.
Those and other reasons have sent the expenses climbing to $21,500 by May 31, said Steve Richmond, Jefferson County Jail superintendent
The budget for the 2007 inmate drug bill is $24,000.
“We’ve never had this many inmates taking this many medications in the 17 years I’ve been here,” Richmond said.
In 2006, the inmate prescription drug budget was also $24,000.
But by the end of that year, the costs did not meet or surpass that amount.
In a memo sent to Jefferson County Sheriff Mike Brasfield earlier this month, and forwarded to the three county commissioners, Richmond mentioned several reasons for the rising costs.
Richmond said he and Ken Brown, a registered family nurse practitioner who visits the jail twice a week to care for inmates, will meet soon with health officials from Pierce, Thurston and Mason counties to discuss the issue.
These counties, along with Kitsap and Clallam, are also experiencing substantial increases in medications and inmates with mental health issues, Richmond said.
Brown was at the Jefferson County jail in Port Hadlock on Tuesday treating inmates.
Of the 48 inmates housed at the jail, Brown dispensed medications to 23 of them.
Of those, 18 took medications for some type of psychiatric illness, he said.
Brown, who has regularly visited the jail twice a week for the past four years, said he likely will step up the frequency to three times a week.
Some medications that inmates used to take, such as Prozac, cost $1 a pill, but new drugs being prescribed for similar mental illnesses cost up to $4.50 a pill, Brown said.
