WITH DRUG'S LURE, WORRIES SPREAD

A Target For Robbers, OxyContin Can Subject Addicts To Painful Withdrawal

It comes in small pills, is of reliable quality, and has become the hottest
drug on the streets. To users, OxyContin, a powerful prescription
painkiller, is heroin without the stigma, a high without a needle.

"Everybody I know is doing them," said Joe, who is in rehab in South Boston
for the fourth time this year. "They make you feel awesome. For, like, two
hours everything is totally excellent."

To dealers, the drug is relatively easy to get - nearly every pharmacy
stocks it - and demand is shooting through the roof.

Armed robbers have hit a dozen pharmacies in the last three months in the
Boston area, taking entire supplies of OxyContin that can be sold on the
street for about 30 times the retail price - tens of thousands of dollars
per robbery.

Yet, despite the efforts of a suburban police task force to address the
spate of hit-and-run holdups, only one suspect has been caught: 18-year-old
Shawn Noonan, who was charged with armed robbery and arraigned yesterday in
Peabody. Police tracked him from photographs shown to witnesses. He was
remanded to Department of Youth Services custody for violating his parole
for an armed robbery last year.

Police believe Noonan may be a member of a group - characterized by their
wearing of baseball hats and bandannas - responsible for a majority of the
robberies, but they still don't know who they are.

"They function very well together," said Winchester Detective Lieutenant
James Pierce, who heads an organization of suburban Massachusetts police
departments designed to pool information about regional crimes. "We still
don't know what their plan is or their pattern. All we know is that they
operate in two-or three-person teams. They all brandish firearms. They're
in and out of there very quickly. They ask for OxyContins and Percocet;
they don't even take the cash."

Stolen in robberies or ripped off by users with phony prescriptions, the
OxyContin pills convert to dollars with barely any effort. Street value is
$1 per milligram and customers are typically addicted within two weeks,
said Jack Leary, a drug abuse counselor and probation officer in South
Boston. Leary has spoken at 12 community meetings in the Boston area about
OxyContin during the past month.

Joe, a 22-year-old from South Boston who is being counseled by Leary,
started by splitting a 40-milligram pill into four sections and snorting
the small piles.

"I couldn't believe that such a tiny amount of powder could make you feel
so good," said Joe, who asked that his real name not be used.

The high, a contentment which users say is unparalleled in the sober
spectrum, is "exactly like heroin, exactly," he said.

But so is the withdrawal. "The first day isn't so bad, but the second day
you start getting headaches and stomach aches, your bones ache. You have no
energy," Joe said.

Pills are color-coded by dose: Ten milligrams are white, 20s are pink, 40s
are yellow, 80s are green, and 160s are blue.

"A couple of months and you're snorting blues," Joe said. "Your tolerance
grows really fast."

Rashes of OxyContin robberies have also been reported in Maine, West
Virginia, and Michigan, police said.

The drug first began showing up on local streets a couple of years ago.
Last year, in the South Boston courts, more than a quarter of the 813
people sent to residential treatment programs had used OxyContin, says Leary.

"With heroin everybody is, like, careful," said Joe. "But this seems safe.
If your parents find out you're doing heroin that's one thing, but if its
OCs it's not as big a deal."

That ignorance, says Diane Brackett, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement
Agency's New England division, has fed the drug's popularity.

"Popping a pill seems less dangerous. There is less taboo surrounding a
pill than snorting or injecting heroin," Brackett said. "People think it's
like ecstasy, which is very popular right now. Pills are very trendy right
now."

OxyContin is designed for cancer patients and others in extreme, prolonged
pain. It is specially coated to deliver its medication in small doses over
a 12-hour period. The drug's maker, Purdue Pharma LP of Stamford, Conn.,
has made it harder to falsify prescriptions, but the pills still make it to
the street.

Street users scrape off the coating and then swallow, snort, and even
inject the crushed pills, giving them an instantaneous high.

"Once someone becomes addicted, they can't focus on anything but the
medication," said Donna Dugger, a nurse at the Southern Middlesex
Opportunity Council's Framingham detox center. She said that OxyContin
users must be weaned off the drug over a week to avoid painful withdrawal
symptoms. The clinic gives patients Darvocet, an opiate that does not
produce a high.

"Even with the Darvocet they can have cramping, muscle aches. They can't
think," said Dugger. "There is a high relapse rate after treatment; 1 in 3
come back."

Even worse, those who don't come back for OxyContin detox often become
addicted to heroin.

Users who can't afford the increasing number of pills needed to reach the
same high turn to heroin, which is cheaper, stronger, and just as easy to get.

"You can get four bags of heroin for $40, but you need more of the
OxyContins to get the same high," said Brackett. "So heroin may become
cheaper for OxyContin users who build up a tolerance to the drug."