The state’s lagging effort to provide physicians and pharmacists with the tools necessary to properly monitor the use of powerful prescription painkillers needs a jump-start. Pennsylvania needs a functioning prescription drug database that is accessible to doctors and pharmacists.

Forty-nine other states already have these systems up and running — some are optional, others are mandatory — but Pennsylvania continues to lag behind, with a system that’s only accessible to the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General.

A state law passed in October 2014, calling for the creation of a mandatory prescription drug monitoring program that would give doctors and pharmacists access, is still not functioning. The system was originally projected to be up and running by mid-2015, but it was only two weeks ago, on Feb. 16, that Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Karen Murphy announced that the state had finally selected a vendor to oversee the database’s development.

Critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union, have opposed the law, saying it would violate patients’ right to privacy when it comes to medical information. But the case for placing reasonable checks on the distribution of powerful prescription painkillers is obvious. These medications are widely prescribed, poorly managed and immensely dangerous. They are killing people, creating a new generation of addicts, and crippling the state’s ill-prepared and underfunded system of social services.

Prescription pills and cheap, widely available heroin are the main culprits in this tidal wave of overdose deaths, and prescription drugs are the feeder system that has built the heroin epidemic into the convention-smashing behemoth it has become.

Heroin was present in 65 percent of illicit-drug-related overdose deaths in Pennsylvania in 2014, and prescription opioids — most frequently oxycodone — were found in 60 percent of all drug-related overdose victims, according to a 2015 Drug Enforcement Administration report billed as the first comprehensive analysis of drug-related overdose deaths in Pennsylvania.

The report also reveals that the crisis knows almost no gender-based, racial or socioeconomic boundaries. Sixty-four percent of victims were male; 80 percent were white; and 68 percent were aged 31 to 60.

Overdose deaths, when it comes to raw numbers, are predictably more concentrated in metropolitan areas. Philadelphia County leads the way with 655, and Allegheny County is second with 307. But of the 20 Pennsylvania counties with the highest rates of drug-related deaths, 12 are rural, according to the DEA report. Butler County is ranked 21st in the state with an overdose death rate of 18.29 per 100,000 people — just below the statewide rate of 18.9.

Drug overdoses were reported as the leading cause of injury in Pennsylvania, according to a June 2015 report by the Trust for America’s Health. It also noted that deaths from drug overdoses in Pennsylvania surpassed car accident-related deaths last year. Pennsylvania is not alone in that. Thirty-five other states — including West Virginia and Ohio — have experienced the same surge.

The Trust’s report found that, From 1997 to 2005, prescriptions for OxyContin increased 700 percent; for hydrocodone 300 percent; and a staggering 1,000 percent for methadone.

Every day that doctors and pharmacists go without access to a database that can help them track patients’ use of these drugs and sniff out practices like doctor shopping or pharmacy shopping, this situation grows worse.