DIVERSION OF RX DRUGS ON THE RISE

Illinois Officials Among Those Fighting Abuses

A Riverside County, Calif., psychiatrist who drove a Corvette and
lived in a gated community allegedly wrote prescriptions in the lobby
of his fitness club and outside of restaurants for $100 each.

More than $1 million was stashed in luggage at the house of an Orange
County, Calif., physician who sold black plastic bags of narcotic
painkillers.

And at one Los Angeles pharmacy, people peddled medications out front
while others squeezed inside to buy more drugs.

Health professionals and dishonest patients are diverting powerful and
potentially addictive prescription drugs from legitimate medical
channels, helping fuel a shift toward pharmaceuticals as drugs of
choice, authorities say.

Pharmacy thefts, robberies and burglaries are also contributing to the
problem, investigators say, along with prescription forgeries and
Internet pharmacies that require little information before shipping
drugs. Nationwide, 25 million doses of commonly abused drugs were
reported stolen last year.

In Illinois, the state Prescription Monitoring Program was expanded
last year to cover a much wider range of drugs, including cold
medications. The goal is to gather more data that can help officials
detect drugs that are being diverted and abused.

The Illinois program collects information about prescription drugs
electronically, allowing officials to analyze prescribed medications
by doctor, patient and the kind of drugs prescribed.

The federal government's most recent survey reported that 7 million
Americans engaged in non-medical use of pharmaceutical drugs in 2006
"" up from 6 million two years earlier. And that usage was higher
than for any illicit drug except marijuana.

"Unlike illicit drug use, which shows a continuing downward trend,
prescription drug abuse ... has seen a continual rise through the
1990s and has remained stubbornly steady ... during recent years," Dr.
Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told a
congressional hearing in March.

Other avenues for prescription diversion are forgery and
fraud.

In San Diego, for example, a nurse admitted in 2006 that she obtained
narcotics using forms stolen from a doctor, according to the attorney
general's office.

Dr. Brian Johnston, an East L.A. emergency room chief, said
prescription fraud is increasingly common.

They call a pharmacy "and say, 'I am Suzie and I work for Dr.
Johnston, and he wants a refill on this prescription,' " he said.

To detect fraud and abuse, pharmacists and doctors can request a
patient's prescription history from the database maintained by the
attorney general's office, but the process can take weeks.

Robert Pack, who owns an East Bay computer company, wants to speed up
the system""for personal reasons.

In 2003, his 10-year-old son Troy and 7-year-old daughter Alana were
hit and killed by a driver who had recently received multiple
prescriptions from doctors. She told police she had taken at least
eight Vicodins and muscle relaxants. She is now serving a
second-degree murder sentence of 30 years to life.

Pack has offered to raise $3 million to build and support a computer
system that would allow almost instantaneous checks of patient
prescription records.

"It might have saved my children's lives and might save lives in the
future," he said.

But tracking systems and prosecutions of doctors can have a chilling
effect, said Siobhan Reynolds of the non-profit Pain Relief Network.

"People who, through no fault of their own, need medications are being
spied on by the government," she said.

Los Angeles Times. Tribune reporter Judith Graham contributed to this
report.