THEFT OF PAINKILLER REFLECTS ITS POPULARITY ON THE STREET

WEYMOUTH, Mass., July 6 - On the afternoon of the Fourth of July, a slow
business day, a young man walked into the Walgreen's on this town's main
thoroughfare and said he had a gun. He did not want money.

All he wanted was OxyContin, 1,100 pills of the powerful prescription
painkiller, which would be worth tens of thousands of dollars on the
street. It was the latest in a series of 14 robberies of pharmacies in
Boston and its suburbs in the last six weeks.

The robbers have ignored cash registers and other drugs and taken only
OxyContin, which gives a heroinlike high without the needles or the stigma.

The holdups in the Boston area are part of a surge in OxyContin robberies
and thefts of drugstores in several states, from Maine and Vermont in New
England to Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky in the nation's
midsection, and as far south as Florida and as far west as California.

"These robberies are surprising to us," said Michael Moy, chief of the drug
operations section of diversion control for the Drug Enforcement
Administration. "Usually if people are going to rob a pharmacy, they are
going to ask for all the controlled substances, or ask for money in the
cash register."

The surge in OxyContin robberies, Mr. Moy said, seems to reflect the high
price the drug now commands on the street and its powerfully addictive high.

The street value is $1 a milligram, and the pills, manufactured by Purdue
Pharma L.P. , come in dosages of 10, 20, 40, 80 and 160 milligrams.

In the robberies in the Boston area, only one suspect has been caught, an
18-year-old identified by the police as Shawn Noonan, who was arrested and
charged with armed robbery in suburban Peabody on Monday.

But James Pierce, who is chief of detectives in Winchester and head of a
regional law enforcement task force on the drugstore robberies, said he
believed that about 85 percent of the robberies were being committed by the
same group of young white men.

"They follow the identical pattern, and they know what they're doing,"
Detective Pierce said. "They work in teams of two or three, brandishing
firearms, and they order the customers in the store to the ground, while
one guy goes to the counter and demands the OxyContin," he said. Nobody has
been injured or shot, Detective Pierce said.

But the robberies have caused deep concern around Boston. On Tuesday, two
of the largest supermarket chains in New England, Shaws and Star Market,
announced they would stop carrying OxyContin in their pharmacies. Customers
will still be able to fill their OxyContin prescriptions, but they will
have to wait up to three days while a supply is ordered, a spokesman said.

Shaws and Star Market are owned by J. Sainsbury, Britain's second-biggest
supermarket company. At the small Hingham Centre Pharmacy, in Hingham, a
suburb just south of Weymouth, Paul Mabey, the pharmacist and co-owner, had
signs printed up last week that he put in the front window and on the
counter: "For everyone's safety, we no longer stock the painkiller
OxyContin." "I thought people were becoming afraid to come in, because of
the robberies," Mr. Mabey said. His fellow owner disagreed, saying the
signs themselves were scaring people and causing too much comment.

So he took the signs down. Nonetheless, the store no longer stocks
OxyContin and must order it from a supplier to fill a prescription.

In the past month, there have also been robberies of OxyContin in
pharmacies in Manchester, Vt.; Roseland, Fla.; Cudahy, Wis.; and Overland
Park, Kan., the local police said.

Mr. Moy, of the federal drug agency, said the OxyContin robberies seemed to
cluster in certain states.

Among those with the most serious problem of pharmacy robberies since last
October, he said, were Kentucky, with 55, or 5.5 percent, of its 1,000
drugstores, and Maine with 12, or 4 percent, of its 300 drugstores.
Florida, with 63, and Pennsylvania, with 71, reported the most OxyContin
robberies, Mr. Moy said. New York has recorded 21 such incidents since
October, he said, and California has reported 26, though both states are
larger than the other leaders and have many more pharmacies.

Capt. Jim Thomas of the police in Weymouth, where the robbery took place at
the Walgreen's on Wednesday, said he was receiving a quick education in the
abuse of OxyContin. "They call it the hillbilly heroin," Captain Thomas
said, because of its popularity in Kentucky, West Virginia and southwestern
Virginia, as well as rural parts of Maine.

"By having it, it's like having cash in your hand," he said. "You can sell
it easily on the street.

We've even got reports of it being sold in Weymouth," an old middle- and
working-class town on Massachusetts Bay south of Boston.

While OxyContin is designed to release its active ingredient, oxycodone,
over 12 hours, abusers can get an immediate high by crushing the pills and
snorting or injecting the powder.

In Bowling Green, Ky., employees of Apothecare Pharmacy got tired of being
targets last year after thieves twice stole their supply of OxyContin. So
the workers filled two large OxyContin bottles with leftover Halloween
candy and left them as decoys.

In May, the burglars struck again, and made off with the candy.