COMMON PRESCRIPTION DESTROYING MANY LIVES

GILBERT, W.Va. -- Kristen Rutledge had watched friends slowly kill
themselves with OxyContin. Her own cousin, just 18, shot herself in the
head when she couldn't get more of the drug. Girlfriends were prostituting
themselves for another fix.

Still, when someone offered her a yellowish 40 milligram pill, she took it,
chopped it up and snorted it. It was the start of a three-day binge, and
she was hooked.

"When I got down to two, I started panicking," the 20-year-old says. "I had
to get out and buy some more."

Over the next year, her habit grew until she was taking up to eight "40s" a
day, she says. When her father, Tim Rutledge, a former mayor, found out,
she tricked him into giving her more money by saying she was being
threatened by drug dealers.

Many people in Appalachia call OxyContin "hillbilly heroin." Its abuse may
not have started in the mountains, but it exploded here.

Across the region, people have overdosed on the powerful prescription
painkiller and robbed pharmacies and family members to feed their habits.

"If this was an infectious disease, the Centers for Disease Control [and
Prevention] would be in here in white vans," says Tim Rutledge. "There's no
doubt it's very much a plague."

To cancer patients and chronic pain sufferers, OxyContin is a wonder drug.

While most strong pain medicines last only about four hours and take an
hour or so to work, Oxy gives a steady 12-hour release of pain medicine
with fewer side effects.

But to addicts who chew the pill or crush it to snort or inject, Oxy
produces a one-shot, heroinlike high that can kill.

Purdue Pharma, the drug's maker, is willing to concede that Oxy abuse has
led to "somewhere between dozens and hundreds" of deaths in the past two
years, says David Haddox, the firm's medical director.

Purdue Pharma has taken steps to limit the damage. The company has stopped
shipping its 160 milligram pills and has offered tamper-resistant
prescription pads to doctors, among other things.

Law enforcement officials insist the problems have not been overblown.

Dealers have been charged with homicide in Virginia and Florida; doctors
have been convicted of illegally dispensing OxyContin; Oxy-related burglary
and armed robbery charges abound nationwide.

On June 11, the state of West Virginia sued the drug's makers, accusing
them of pressuring and enticing doctors to over-prescribe Oxy and of
failing to adequately warn of potential abuse, charges the company denies.

Michael Pratt, a prosecutor focusing on drug crimes in Kentucky, Tennessee
and West Virginia, sees reasons OxyContin hit Appalachia especially hard.

The Appalachian economy has long been dependent on coal and timber,
industries that produce serious injuries, so there are large numbers of
people on painkillers.

In addition, OxyContin sells on the street for $1 a milligram - up to $160
for the highest-dosage pill. In an area with chronic unemployment, that
kind of money is hard to turn down.

"This is a nuclear bomb," says Gregory Wood, a health fraud investigator
with the U.S. attorney's office in Roanoke, Va. "I was a cop in Detroit and
saw crack come through the ghettos, and I've never seen anything like this."

Neither had the tiny town of Gilbert.

OxyContin found its way to Gilbert, population 417, about five years ago.
Police blame the drug for at least four deaths in town and about a dozen
for the entire county.

A mental health counselor tells of a man who was having his teeth pulled
two at a time, because each visit meant a new Oxy prescription. Kristen
Rutledge has known people to shoot themselves for a prescription.

"It seems like if you're around people who are doing it, you catch it,"
says Judy Compton, manager of the Compton Inn. "It's contagious."

She knows all too well. Her sister caught it, too.

Jeanie Compton was spoiled. Her mother gave her a red convertible BMW
before she could even drive, and a trailer home to live in. When she wanted
to get married at age 15, her mother drove her across the Tug River to
Kentucky.

Now it's all gone. The BMW? Traded for OxyContin. The trailer? Sold for a
few thousand dollars' worth of pills. The husband? Found slumped over in
the bathroom with a needle nearby, dead of a suspected Oxy overdose.

At one point, Joyce Compton says her daughter was raiding the family's
motel for televisions, microwaves, mattresses, to supply her habit.

After recently spending her 23rd birthday in jail for violating home
confinement to seek Oxy, Jeanie Compton thinks she's ready to get serious
about kicking the drug.

"I've said I'm either going to end up in jail or dead," she says.

"Well, I made it to the jail. I can't come back from the grave."

When Kristen Rutledge finally decided to quit Oxy, she did it cold turkey.

The withdrawal lasted three days.

"I'd rather have died," she says.

She's been clean for a month, but she's not kidding herself, she says. "I'm
still addicted," she says. "I'm just not using."