Gov. Tom Wolf inked his name to a package of legislation Wednesday aimed at battling Pennsylvania’s heroin and opioid epidemic.

The bills include:• House Bill 1699, which mandates that hospital emergency departments and urgent care centers may not prescribe opioids in quantities that last more than seven days and they may not write refills for opioid prescriptions.• House Bill 1737, which allows all federal, state and local law enforcement entities, hospitals, assisted living facilities, home health care agencies, long-term care nursing facilities, hospice and commonwealth-licensed pharmacies to serve as drop-off locations for any extra, unwanted, expired prescription drugs or over-the-counter pharmaceutical products.• Senate Bill 1367, which restricts physicians’ ability to prescribe opioids to minors, including limiting prescriptions to seven days.• Senate Bill 1368, which establishes a safe opioid prescribing curriculum in medical colleges and other medical training facilities.• Senate Bill 1202, which requires prescribers to check the database every time they prescribe an opioid or benzodiazepine and requires dispensers to input prescription data to the database within 24 hours of dispensing.“I am proud to sign a package of bills that represents the work that we have all done together to address the heroin and opioid abuse crisis, and begins to curb the effects of this public health epidemic in Pennsylvania,” said Wolf at a news conference held in Harrisburg.“Four weeks ago, I addressed a joint session of the General Assembly to outline a set of legislative goals that would help us tackle this public health crisis and together, the General Assembly and my administration committed to help the victims of substance use disorder, and the communities that have been devastated by this terrible disease.”State Rep. Doyle Heffley, R-Carbon, was invited to attend the event by Gov. Wolf. Heffley said many of the measures signed into law stemmed from his House Resolution 659 of 2014, which created the Task Force and Advisory Committee on Opioid Prescription Drug Proliferation.“The measures signed into law today represent a significant effort from the House, Senate and Gov. Tom Wolf to address this crisis and prevent opioids from being misused. Pennsylvania’s opioid-abuse crisis is claiming an average of 10 lives per day, and I believe this legislation will help curb this tragic public health crisis,” Heffley said.“These measures will not prevent cancer patients or individuals suffering chronic pain from receiving proper treatment. They will, however, help reduce the overprescribing of opioids. We have more work to do and I am looking forward to returning to Harrisburg next session to continue meaningful, bipartisan work on this issue.”Heffley sponsored a bill that would have required health insurance plans to cover at least three abuse-deterrent opioids if they provide coverage for an opioid painkiller.The abuse-deterrent opioids are those hard to snort, smoke or inject.Following some last-minute amendments, however, the bill never got a final vote before the General Assembly ended its session for the year.“It was disappointing, but this bill isn’t going to go away,” Heffley said.“In the end, special interests got in the way. The insurance federation got some amendments on that didn’t please the Pennsylvania Medical Society. When you’re fighting big special interest groups, it’s hard. Some people are making a lot of money based on how we prescribe this stuff and they don’t want things to change. It’s important legislation though and we’ll keep at it.”That legislation, according to Heffley, was initiated after his conversation with a Carbon County family who lost a loved one to an overdose on time-release formula painkillers.“I never want to see another instance like that in Carbon County or anywhere, and that is why we’ll keep fighting for it,” Heffley said.Neil Makhija, Democratic challenger to Heffley in the upcoming general election, criticized the bill, claiming that it stood to pad the pockets of big pharmaceutical companies.“Doyle Heffley couldn’t pass a single bill to help us on the opioid crisis, because he went too far in serving the drug companies who fund his campaigns instead of our families who are suffering,” Makhija said.“The Senate rejected Heffley’s bill after it was criticized as a giveaway to drug company lobbyists,” he said.Asked what he would do differently, Makhija said he would craft legislation to make pharmaceutical companies pay for things like drug courts and treatment centers.“The pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be writing the bills, they should be paying for the crisis,” he said. “This has been proven to work in other places and it can work here.”