COUPLE DRUG EDUCATION WITH TREATMENT FOR ADDICTS

Initiatives To Prevent Abuse Of A Powerful Pain-killer Are Sound. Alone,
Though, They Ignore An Immediate Need.

OXYCONTIN addicts need treatment, desperately. Isolated, poverty-stricken
Lee County doesn't have the resources to provide it. Virginia must.

Attorney General (http://www.oag.state.va.us/Mark Earley has focused
welcome attention on the abuse of this prescription painkiller, which has
claimed more than 30 lives and generated a crime wave in Lee and other
rural counties in Far Southwest.

Last week, Earley met with the drug's manufacturer and ticked off seven
initiatives that the state and Purdue Pharma would undertake in response.
The list is good, as far as it goes: education, both for medical
professionals and for parents and their children; better prescription
monitoring; more sophisticated law-enforcement techniques.

Missing, though, was any mention of new drug-treatment programs. Yet
treatment is an immediate, critical, unmet need.

"We've got parents that are coming to us, kids that are coming to us and
adults saying, 'We want off of this stuff,'" Lee County Sheriff Gary
Parsons said. "We've got no resources to help them."

Listen to the cop on the front line. Help.

Yes, prevention is ideal. There would be no need for treatment if people
did not become addicted to the drug in the first place.

But people are addicted. More will become addicted. Even highly successful
education programs will not reach everyone, or discourage everyone they do
reach from engaging in risky behavior.

Once people are hooked, their problem becomes everyone's problem, as the
rise in crime in normally peaceable rural areas demonstrates so dramatically.

Virginia is strapped for bucks right now. But if it can afford to send
millions upon millions of dollars to Northern Virginia to relieve their
local tax burden, it should be able first to cover pressing needs. This is one.