DRUG WARRIORS

Heroes Stood Up Against OxyContin

If a dangerous new drug showed up in your neighborhood, how far would you
go to protect your neighbors and their children from it?

Say you co-owned a pharmacy and realized that phony prescriptions were
being used to dispense the drug. Would you keep careful copies of the fake
prescriptions and also warn other pharmacies? Would you alert the federal
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and keep bugging people there when it
seemed no one was following up?

Would you persist even in the face of firebombings and death threats?

Whoa! Are you kidding?

But, thankfully, there really are such community heroes out there.

Due to the persistence and stark bravery of Fishtown pharmacist Ron Hyman,
a deadly drug flow has been stemmed and an accused doctor awaits trial.

As explained in a three-part series by Inquirer reporters Alicia A.
Caldwell, Mark Bowden and Elisa Ung, the painkiller OxyContin was
introduced by Connecticut drug company Purdue Pharma in 1996 to help cancer
patients and others in severe pain.

But its legitimate use has quickly become overshadowed by an illegitimate
one: OxyContin - or Oxy as it is known on the streets - is a hot ticket
among drug abusers looking for a heroin-like high.

Mostly, it's been a ticket to death. In Philadelphia alone, 41 have died
from OxyContin abuse in just the past year. Victims, who often mix the drug
with the tranquilizer Xanax, included aspiring teens with bright futures
ahead of them.

Now the only hope for their future is that their tragic and, yes, stupid,
deaths will prevent others from suffering the same fate.

Investigators identify Bensalem doctor Richard Paolino as the number one
source of the OxyContin flow to the Fishtown, Port Richmond and Kensington
neighborhoods.

For a price, police allege, Dr. Paolino wrote more than 1,200 bogus
OxyContin prescriptions. He denies the charges.

Whatever the source of the phony prescriptions, they activated the dogged
professionalism of pharmacist Hyman, who was not going to allow such a scam
on his watch.

Mr. Hyman took on not only the doctor but also the DEA, which disregarded
his calls until Mr. Hyman threatened to hold a press conference. (It makes
one wonder how DEA agents spend their time - shooting rubber bands at
drug-target maps?)

There are other citizen heroes in this story as well, including pharmacists
Brad Tabaac in Fishtown and Steve Chesin in Bensalem. The father of dead
teen OxyContin victim Eddie Bisch, Ed Bisch, has created an OxyContin
warning Web site.

They all deserve medals.