HELENA — It’s been more than three years since Lee Ann Logan’s addicted, beloved son fell to his death off a sheer sandstone cliff overlooking Billings.

His death “culminated the end of five years of hell,” Logan told the more than 180 people gathered here Tuesday for Attorney General Steve Bullock’s first summit, called Prescription Drug Abuse: The Silent Epidemic.

Jeff Logan died just days before his 23rd birthday. He started abusing prescription drugs as a teenager.

Last year, Bullock said, almost 10 percent of Montana teenagers reported abusing prescription drugs, making the state third in the nation per capita in that category.

While so-called “harder” drugs like methamphetamine have grabbed the public’s attention, prompting a fevered reaction among law enforcement and lawmakers, prescription drug abuse, in fact, killed more Montanans than meth, even at the height of the meth addiction, one speaker said. The state’s investigators say prescription drug abuse made up 42 percent of all the drug cases they investigated in Montana this year.

Bullock said he hopes the one-day summit will be the beginning of public awareness of the issue.

One big priority, he said, is to develop a statewide prescription drug monitoring program. The Montana Legislature has twice rejected such an idea.

But according to Bill Gallea, a Helena emergency room physician, doctors need to know if the person before them complaining of a headache is legitimately suffering or a pill-seeker pulling the same stunt with doctors all over town.

In just the past month, Gallea said, he’s seen several people come into the St. Peter’s Hospital emergency room complaining of faked headaches, faked car accidents, faked ovarian cysts. And he’s knows they’re faking, Gallea said, because the same person will show up night after night, giving different names and different stories about why he or she needs heavy duty, opiate pain-killers.

One woman even faked her way into abdominal surgery and a multinight hospital stay.

A database would allow physicians to know all of the prescriptions a person has, letting doctors know if the patient is shopping for meds.

There are some successes. Missoula County, for example, is hosting regular prescription drug drop-off days. Their first event in June gathered more than 130 pounds of drugs that officials incinerated.

“The oldest one was in a glass bottled dated 1951,” said Capt. T. Gregory Hintz, of the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department.

Bullock’s office has also launched a six-person prescription drug diversion unit with a $1.2 million federal grant, announced earlier this fall. That group will focus on education, investigation and prosecuting prescription drug abusers and dealers.

Bullock said there are some things parents can do immediately.

“Talk to your kids,” he said.

Polls show that about 78 percent of parents talk to their kids about the dangers of alcohol and drugs like marijuana. But only 24 percent have brought up the dangers of prescription drugs.

“It’s not illegal, or so they think,” he said.

Of the nearly 10 percent of Montana kids who have abused prescription drugs, about half say they do it because it’s “safer,” Bullock said.

Logan said she remembers the dinner she had with her son and his wife several years ago when they first talked about using prescription drugs. Both brought up the “safety” of the drugs.

Yet last year, Bullock said, about 300 Montana deaths analyzed by the state crime lab in Missoula showed evidence of the prescription drugs most commonly abused. That’s almost one every day.

Logan and others described a disconnect in our society: Her son grew up watching prescription drug commercials on TV. Pills were presented as a safe way of solving your problems. Several doctors at the summit also talked about an emphasis on “adequate pain relief” in medicine, putting greater emphasis on doctors writing scripts for pain killers.

In Logan’s case, “death was not the worst thing that could have happened” she said in an interview after her talk. Yes, her son is deeply mourned. Her grandson, Holden, whom Logan and her husband have adopted and are raising, will never know his father.

But Jeff Logan died before he hurt anyone else, she said.