Drug Deaths By State

Sign of the Times

Epidemic of Oxycontin theft at Walgreens.

ROCHESTER, NH — Police are looking for a suspect who robbed the Walgreens Pharmacy on South Main Street early Sunday morning. According to Sgt. Gary Boudreau, police responded around 2 a.m. to the Walgreens at 104 South Main Street for a reported robbery. Boudreau said a single male entered the store, proceeded to the pharmacy counter and passed a note demanding certain prescription medications. The suspect left the store with an undisclosed amount of OxyContin, Oxycodone and Xanax.

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO--The Colorado Springs Police Department's Robbery Unit is seeking assistance identifying the suspect in the Aggravated Robbery of the Walgreens located at 4713 Flintridge Dr in Colorado Springs on January 4, 2011 at 4:22 pm. During the robbery the suspect approached a pharmacist, threatened he had a weapon and demanded Oxycontin. The suspect fled the store with an undisclosed amount of Oxycontin.

WESTBROOK, CT--State Police are investigating strong armed robbery at a Walgreens in Westbrook. State Police say a man entered the Walgreens and demanded narcotics from the pharmacist around noon on Thursday. Police say he made off with more than 100 OxyContin pills.

TIGARD, OR--The Tigard Police Department is investigating a robbery that occurred Monday afternoon at the Walgreens store at 13939 S.W. Pacific Highway. An employee called 9-1-1 to report the incident at approximately 5:10 p.m.  Police officers arrived and began searching for the robber, who had  demanded OxyContin from an employee at the prescription counter. The robber displayed and threatened the employee with a black handgun, police said.

POST FALLS, ID -- Investigators hope surveillance footage will help them catch a pair of Oxycontin robbers who hit a Post Falls Walgreens Sunday. Police say two men walked into the Walgreens at 706 E. Seltice Way at about 11:00 a.m. and approached the pharmacy counter. One of the men handed an employee a "threatening note", demanding the powerful painkiller. The clerk complied with the note and handed over an unknown amount of pills.

LEXINGTON, KY--Police are looking for a man who stole more than 700 prescription pain pills at gunpoint from a Lexington pharmacy early Monday morning. Witnesses said a man wearing blue jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt with the hood up entered the store, displayed a handgun and demanded OxyContin tablets. He appeared to be about 6 feet 3 inches tall and about 180 pounds. He drove away in a brown pickup truck after bagging 772 pills, according to a police report.

SPOKANE, WA--OxyContin robberies in Washington have prompted an unprecedented response from one of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains. New time-delayed safes have been installed in Walgreens pharmacies across the state to hold supplies of the powerful painkiller. The timed locks take several minutes to open, halting immediate access to a prescription drug that’s prompted about a dozen robberies at Spokane County Walgreens stores since last fall, often at gunpoint or knifepoint.

Photo Credit: http://localspice.blogspot.com

Pill Head: Book Review

Desperately seeking Vicodin.

Recently, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, home of the nation’s “drug czar,” released a survey of the nation’s drug use, demonstrating that prescription drugs used non-medically have become the nation second most “abused” drug, after marijuana. In addition, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) chipped in with a cheery report that painkiller drug abuse had increase by a staggering 400% from 1998 to 2008.

 Radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh’s 2006 bust put prescription drug abuse on the public radar. Limbaugh surrendered to authorities on a charge of prescription fraud involving pain pills, the result of a three-year investigation into Limbaugh’s addiction to oxycontin—an addiction that may have cost him his hearing.  (Earlier, in 2001, Winona Ryder was arrested for shoplifting and found to have collected 37 prescriptions for painkillers from a total of 20 different doctors.)

Joshua Lyon, the young author of Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict, can tell you exactly how people have pulled that off: Steal a prescription pad. “Doctor shop” with a list of hard-to-disprove physical ailments. (Migraine is a favorite.) Impersonate a physician and call a pharmacy if you have his or her Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) number. Perhaps connect with a corrupt pharmacy employee, or with an organized ring of truck thieves. Another favorite is stealing pills from old people. Or you can suck it up and try buying them in bars or on the street. For a while, Joshua Lyon found a workable shortcut: “I just posted a bulletin on my MySpace page, asking if anyone had any Vicodin they wanted to sell. By the next day I had three different offers.” Users have learned to easily circumvent the time-release formulations by crushing the pills and snorting the powder, like Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie. Corrupt doctors don’t appear to play a major role in much of this, even though they are a favorite DEA whipping boy.

Lyon’s pain pill odyssey began in 2003 when, as a 27-year-old reporter for Jane magazine, he was assigned a story about the “no prescription needed” Internet pill farms that were stuffing everyone’s email inbox with spam about cheap drugs. The author placed his orders, and in a few days, received Fed Ex boxes containing Xanax, Valium, and Vicodin. In only one case was he required to talk to a prescribing doctor over the phone. The "doctor" briefly asked him why he wanted painkillers, and then simply asked him how many pills he wanted.

No stranger to drug use, and a frequent habitué of the gay club scene in New York City, Lyon quickly discovered that prescription opioids were his drugs of choice. “The media,” he writes, “hadn’t dubbed us ‘Generation Rx’ for nothing.” A DEA official told Lyon: People taking Vicodin or hydrocodone, which is probably the most popular pharmaceutical drug in the United States, get the same rush as they would taking heroin, but you’re taking something that people perceive to be safe.”

There is at least a partial answer to prescription drug abuse: digital prescription databases. Unlike other addictive drugs, opioid medications begin life as legal compounds, licensed and produced under specific federal guidelines. The implementation of an electronic prescription drug reporting system, something several states have already undertaken, is a first step, but is obviously limited by the lack of a federal clearinghouse. And privacy concerns have hampered attempts to systemize the collection of prescription records from different doctors.

A health worker in a Lower East Side naloxone program told Lyon that if he called the ambulance about an OD, “don’t tell them that it’s an overdose. Tell them your friend has stopped breathing. They’ll come faster that way.”

All of this makes the ready availability of naloxone, the anti-overdose drug, an ethical imperative. See my posts on overdose kits for opioid addicts HERE and HERE.

Graphics Credit: http://blog.makezine.com/

OxyContin Back in Court

Kentucky goes after makers of “hillbilly heroin”

The attorney general for the state of Kentucky filed a lawsuit last week against Purdue Pharma L.P., makers of OxyContin, seeking to recover damages related to widespread addiction to the painkiller commonly known as “hillbilly heroin.”

Brought to widespread attention by Rush Limbaugh’s well-publicized addiction, OxyContin is a prescription narcotic for which a thriving black market has been established. It did not take drug users long to discover that OxyContin could also be ground up and either snorted or injected for a heroin-style high. Hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the street use of this Schedule II narcotic. Kentucky state officials say the social costs associated with fighting addiction have increased dramatically since the drug’s introduction. Others states are prepared to make the same argument.

Oxycontin racked up sales of $2 billion for the year ended August 2005. At least two companies, Pain Therapeutics (PTIE) and Alpharma, (ALO) are aiming at the market for more abuse-proof versions of OxyContin. “The big issue,” writes The Motley Fool’s Brian Lawler, “is whether insurers and government health programs will be willing to pay the premium price for an abuse-resistant drug.”

Oxycodone, as the drug is known medically, is a semi-synthetic derivative of thebaine, an alkaloid found in opium. It was developed in Germany in the early years of the 20th Century as a morphine substitute. Today, oxycodone is used extensively and very effectively for pain relief in terminal cancer patients. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the used of OxyContin in a time-release version in 2004.

Purdue Pharma said it will contest the lawsuit, which charges fraud, conspiracy and negligence--but the company recently settled other litigation with West Virginia and the U.S. Department of Justice for $685 million in cases alleging illegal marketing and promotion of the drug. U.S Attorney John Brownlee of the Western District of Virginia said that company sales reps falsely implied that OxyContin had less potential for addiction and abuse than similar prescription narcotics. Several other states were parties to those complaints, in which Purdue Pharma officials pled guilty last year to charges of misleading the public. Several states have taken a similar approach toward Merck, the manufacturers of Vioxx.

The Kentucky attorney general’s office said OxyContin addiction was so widespread that officials in Pike County were forced to build a $5.6 addition to the county jail to cope with increased convictions for oxycodone addiction. “It’s ironic that those who manufacture a drug that is meant to ease the pain of those suffering from debilitating diseases… have in fact inflicted so much pain by being deceptive and greedy,” said Country Judge-Executive Wayne Rutherford.

With the plethora of state lawsuits brought on behalf of Medicaid programs and law-enforcement agencies against OxyContin, “I think we have the answer as to whether government health programs will cover the costs of these abuse-resistant drugs,” Lawler concludes. “Count this as one less hurdle for Pain Therapeutics, Alpharma, and the other developers of these abuse-resistant compounds."