OxyContin Becoming Interchangeable with Heroin
Posted on December 30, 2009OxyContin and heroin are now being sold interchangeably on street corners, said Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office in Pennsylvania. Oxycontin is a powerful narcotic painkiller that gives users a similar high to heroin.
Ron A., 57, a resident of the Easy Does It addictions treatment center in Bern Township, was a heroin addict for years. "Then one day I learned I could get the same high from prescription drugs and they were a lot easier to get," said Ron, who said he raided the medicine cabinets of friends and family and started going to doctors and dentists with made-up maladies, asking for pain medicine.
"They gave me Oxycontin and Dilaudid and other pain medications," he said. "It got to the point I was taking so many pills they didn’t even work anymore."
Dan Kelly of the Reading Eagle writes that Dr. Charles F. Barbera, chairman of the department of emergency medicine at Reading Hospital, said doctors are continually evaluating patients for pain in the emergency room.
"We have a system here that identifies people who we feel may have some dependence on prescription drugs, and we try to offer them ways through our social services department to regulate prescription drug usage," Barbera said. "That usually involves consultation with the family doctor and designating one person to authorize prescription drug usage in at-risk patients.”
"We see people misuse prescription drugs that they have for valid medical reasons, and we also see people that utilize prescription drugs and maybe come to us and several other hospitals seeking prescription drugs,” he continued.
In addition to doctor shopping, addicts now can order prescription painkillers on the Internet without a prescription.
"It’s an ongoing battle: prescription drug abuse and what we call prescription drug diversion, which is when people get legal prescription drugs and divert them for illegal purposes," Frederiksen said, adding that prescription fraud, or forgery, sometimes involves medical professionals diverting the drugs for themselves or others.
In addition, the state attorney general obtained a $5 million civil judgment against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, saying the company downplayed the addictive nature of the drug and marketed it to physicians as a replacement for other nonaddictive painkillers.
"That was a recipe for addiction," Frederiksen said. "There have been changes, but we continue to work with other attorneys general because the problem with OxyContin started up and down the Appalachian Mountains," he said. "In some states it was referred to as ‘hillbilly heroin.’"
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said a study of patient deaths between 1999 and 2007 showed an 83 percent increase in accidental overdose deaths due to prescription painkillers.
A companion study by the Canadian Medical Association found that the numbers of accidental prescription drug deaths in Canada increased by 500 percent since 1991.
