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Pharmacists around the state are scrambling to get their systems in place to report customers who buy powerful painkillers to the Department of Health. The long awaited prescription drug monitoring database goes live at midnight tonight. As Whitney Ray tells us, soon people who lie to doctors to score massive amounts painkillers will be tracked.

Pharmacist Marsha Jackson can usually spot a person lying to get painkillers.

“And those that we have questions about we don’t fill their prescriptions. We try to notify the doctor to see if it’s legit,” said Marsha.

And soon doctors will have another tool to know who is abusing the system. Starting Thursday pharmacists will begin reporting people who buy painkillers to the Department of Health. Becky Poston is supervising of the prescription drug monitoring database.

“Every seven days from the time the prescription was actually dispensed, the pharmacy or the dispensing practitioner would upload that information into our database,” said Poston.

Starting in mid-October doctors will be able to access the database to see how many times one of their patients has been prescribed pain meds.

But the database is just one more step in an aggressive effort to get powerful painkillers off the streets. Pill mills have been raided. Doctors arrested.

In total nearly a thousand people at pain clinics across the state have been arrested. It’s all in hopes of saving lives. Last year 56-hundred died after taking painkillers.

That’s more than seven a day. The database is expected to keep even more of the drugs off the streets, but updating the system is means extra work for pharmacists.

“It’s just more for us to do outside of us taking care of our patients,” said Marsha.

Even though it’s more work, Marsha sees the need and hopes it helps Florida shed its title of Pill Mill Capital of the Country. To protect patient’s privacy doctors can only check on their patients. Doctors who abuse the system face felony charges.