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 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.