Democratic candidate for attorney general Steve Bullock says Montana must do more to combat prescription drug abuse, which is now the state's No. 1 drug priority according to a top narcotics officer.

"While our vigilance against meth cannot end, we must also mount a battle against this invisible epidemic," said Bullock, a Helena lawyer and one of three Democrats vying to be attorney general.

Bullock outlined a plan earlier this month to address the problem, which includes tracking prescriptions for certain narcotic medicines and making it a crime to seek the same narcotic prescriptions from many different doctors.

About 240 Montanans died last year after using some of the top 20 most commonly abused prescription drugs, said Mark Long, chief of the narcotics bureau in the state's Division of Criminal Investigation. That division is under the Department of Justice, headed by the attorney general.

In comparison, eight Montanans died last year due to methamphetamine overdoses.

Long obscured by Montana's meth crisis, prescription-drug abuse has quietly emerged as a major drug problem, Long said, one that his office is treating as its top priority after years of exclusively going after meth. Today, Montana teenagers report using prescription drugs more than any other substance, he said.

"We're behind the curve on it," Long said. "We do very little about it."

Addicts acquire prescription drugs by stealing them, faking injuries and getting legitimate prescriptions or by getting prescriptions from several different doctors for the same injury, a practice known as "doctor shopping."

Most of the drugs are powerful, narcotic painkillers like OxyContin or new-generation sleeping pills like Ambien. Even medications that would seem to be difficult to abuse, like painkillers embedded in a patch and absorbed over time through the skin, are emerging as favorites for abuse. Addicts will steal the skin patches --sometimes right off the bodies of elderly patients -- cut them up and eat them, Long said.

Bullock recommends creating a prescription drug database for certain medications that doctors and pharmacists could use to see if patients are getting multiple prescriptions from different doctors. Montana is one of about eight states without such a database.

Right now, Long said, doctors and pharmacists in Montana have no idea if the patient complaining of pain is getting OxyContin prescriptions all over town and selling those pills to other addicts. Long said a database alone would go a long way to ending the problem.

"It would basically be the industry policing itself," he said.

Bullock said the database would not be readily available to law enforcement and would only cover certain drugs to protect Montanans' privacy. He also proposes outlawing doctor shopping and mounting a public information campaign against prescription drug abuse.

Ironically, Long said, it's the success of Montana's cutting-edge meth education program that may be driving an increase in prescription drug abuse. Billboards and television ads have rightly depicted meth as a dangerous drug that destroys lives. Prescriptions, in contrast, may seem clean and safer.

"I think a lot of kids think, 'How bad can it be? It comes from a doctor,' " he said.