OFFICIALS GETTING HOOKED

The attorney general's staffers had been restless, bored and reduced to
casting about the legal landscape for an occasional fast-buck cable
operator or unscrupulous aluminum siding salesman to hammer with a consent
decree.

Then, last winter, at first barely perceptible, an exciting scent drifted
through the corridors.

Darrell McGraw sniffed it. They all sniffed it, the delicious yet faint
odor of a potentially massive payoff, perhaps one that could be obtained
without a whole lot of work.

It smelled something like tobacco money.

But this tantalizing aroma emanated not from a manufacturer whose dangerous
product had been used as intended but rather from manufacturers whose
beneficial product invites widespread misuse.

The product is the pain-killer OxyContin and people in the attorney
general's jurisdiction were cheating, lying, prostituting themselves, even
robbing to get their hands on some.

The OxyContin abuse problem seems to have disproportionately fallen on
Southern West Virginia, which to dispassionate observers may say more about
Southern West Virginia than OxyContin.

But that was but a piffle to McGraw and his staff. Like hungry hounds
chasing a fat sheep, they are in pursuit of OxyContin manufacturers.

The suit was filed Monday in the friendly confines of McDowell Circuit Court.

The state will try to show the drug companies went overboard in promoting
OxyContin's efficacy to doctors, causing them to write prescriptions they
shouldn't have.

Paul Nusbaum, secretary of the state Department of Health and Human
Resources, may have touched on the core of the case with this observation:

"A lot of the use and abuse is in small rural communities. When you have
rural physicians who are isolated and get visits from drug representatives,
they are told that if they don't use this drug (OxyContin) they can be sued
for malpractice."

So there you have it, doctors who suspend judgment and take advice from
traveling salesmen, yet another example of West Virginia's historic
isolation-induced vulnerability, with an unenlightened populace unable to
resist exploitation by outside profiteers.

If Nusbaum is right, one could conclude the larger threat to public health
and welfare in rural areas is not so much overprescribing of OxyContin but
gullible bumpkin doctors who somehow managed to survive at least seven
years of rigorous medical training and get a license.

The same properties that bring unusual relief to many cancer sufferers also
create tremendous potential for OxyContin abuse.

People hold up drug stores to get OxyContin without even bothering to
demand the cash.

McGraw and company have just barged in and handed manufacturers a note.
They want the cash.

No other state has filed such a suit.

Manufacturers may rue the day they made OxyContin available here in the
first place.