OXYCONTIN DEATHS ON RISE IN GEORGIA

A 15-year-old Covington boy overdosed on the painkiller OxyContin this
week, highlighting the prescription drug's deadly impact on Georgia.

Last year, 62 Georgians died of OxyContin-related causes, according to the
GBI. Through June of this year, 45 other deaths in Georgia had been
attributed to the highly addictive drug.

More than 100 overdose deaths are expected by year's end, investigators
predict, mostly drug abusers seeking a heroinlike high by snorting or
shooting the white powder that is produced by crushing the pills.

"It's a staggering problem right now in Georgia," GBI spokesman John
Bankhead said Thursday. "It's a problem not necessarily with the numbers of
drugs we're seeing, but with the impact it's having on deaths and overdoses."

It's also a growing menace primarily in rural, mountainous Georgia. Nobody
really knows why the narcotic has insinuated itself into hard-working
mountain communities from Maine to Kentucky to Alabama.

The profile of an OxyContin abuser also defies stereotype. Until recently,
GBI toxicologists say, the typical OxyContin overdose victim was a white
male in his 40s or 50s. They most likely abused other prescription drugs, too.

Today's OxyContin abuser is more likely to be a white person in his or her
20s or 30s seeking the rush that comes from snorting or shooting the
pulverized painkiller.

Charles David Martin was apparently seeking that high, authorities said.
The teen from Covington was visiting friends with his mother in northwest
Georgia. There, he joined two other 15-year-old boys, sons of Chris
Arrington, for an unsupervised night of partying in the middle-class Naomi
community outside LaFayette.

Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson said the three boys were "experimenting"
with OxyContin.

"Sometime Monday night late, they were all running around the neighborhood
and, at some point, they obtained a bottle of OxyContin," the sheriff said.
"They went back to the residence. Apparently (Charles) must have taken
several pills late that night. I believe he took more early Tuesday a.m.
And that's when it resulted in respiratory failure and, ultimately, death."

Deputies got the emergency call --- "a boy unconscious and unresponsive"
at 4 p.m. Tuesday. Martin was taken to Hutcheson Medical Center in
nearby Fort Oglethorpe, where he was pronounced dead. The medical examiner
preliminarily ruled the teenager died from an acute, toxic overdose of
OxyContin, the sheriff said.

Wilson declined to provide information on who provided the boys with the
OxyContin, other than to say the supplier didn't have a prescription for
the drug.

Scores of Americans have died from apparent OxyContin-related overdoses
since the country's best-selling painkiller was introduced in 1996. Taken
prudently, OxyContin is a slow-release narcotic for people suffering
moderate to severe chronic pain. It is prescribed for arthritis, back pain,
cancer and other painful maladies.

Drug abusers circumvent the time-release process by crushing the pills and
snorting the powder, like cocaine, or mixing it with water and shooting it,
like heroin.

OxyContin has been linked to at least 43 deaths in southwestern Virginia
and blamed for a reported 80 percent of the crime in the mountainous,
remote region. In Tazewell, Va., patients must provide fingerprints at
pharmacies to obtain the prescription drug.

Florida, Maine, West Virginia, Ohio and South Carolina have put
restrictions on the drug's distribution to Medicaid recipients.

At least 13 lawsuits have been filed against Purdue Pharma LP, maker of
OxyContin. West Virginia sued the manufacturer in June, claiming the
company aggressively tried to get doctors to overprescribe the drug while
failing to warn of its potential for abuse.

The drug maker denies the accusations. On Wednesday, Purdue Pharma
announced plans for a "smart pill" that would destroy its narcotic
ingredients if crushed into a powder. It will not be available for at least
three years, though.

Last month, a federal grand jury in Charlotte indicted 10 people suspected
of illegally selling 50,000 OxyContin pills across the Carolinas, Virginia
and West Virginia.

"It's becoming a wider-spread problem. We are hearing more about it every
day from informants," said pharmacist Ron Bieri, a special agent with
Georgia's Drugs and Narcotics Agency. "But I don't know why it has become
such a tremendous drug of choice. There are other drugs out there with the
same effect."

Bieri was a member of a federal, state and local task force targeting
prescription drug abuse in North Georgia. About six months ago, OxyContin
pills appeared on the black market.

Bieri expects 50 or so arrests over the next few months, mostly in North
Georgia. But OxyContin crimes and overdoses infiltrate all corners of rural
Georgia.

Investigators want to know why.

"Maybe it's because workers in the textile mills are getting hurt on the
job, going to doctors who put them on OxyContin and they get hooked. Then
they start selling it or experimenting, and one thing leads to another,"
Bieri said.

"We've not made any buys off any middle-class professional-type workers.
It's always been working-class, blue-collar people or the disabled."