A NEW 'WORST' DRUG STIRS UP THE SNOOPS

After life, there is no right more inalienable, no practice more
justifiably autonomous, than managing your own pain. Property is not nearly
so dear. Happiness, or its pursuit, depends on it. And liberty means
nothing without it.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, failed to grasp this fundamental
constitutional principle when it upheld the criminalization of medical
marijuana this past spring. What makes this decision all the more absurd is
the fact that heroin is legal in this country. It's masquerading under
another name--OxyContin--and so far has eluded judicial radar, but all
that's about to change.

Oxy's active ingredient, oxycodone hydrochloride, is derived from the opium
alkaloid thebaine and is most often prescribed for severe pain management.
When taken orally, the pills dispense steady incremental doses of analgesic
over the course of 12 hours, but drug addicts on the street have discovered
that crushing the pills and either snorting or injecting the powder
produces an explosive, immediate high that they say is better than cut
heroin. Though Oxy is a powerful, FDA-approved drug that has been on the
market since the mid-1990s, it was a sleeper until a recent spate of
drugstore robberies, mostly in the eastern United States, caught local law
enforcement officers and even the Drug Enforcement Administration off
guard. There have been 14 such robberies in the Boston area alone in the
past two months, and similar reports are surfacing in Maine, West Virginia,
Kentucky and Florida. The perpetrators didn't want cash--just Oxy, which
sells on the black market for $1 per milligram at doses of 10, 20, 40, 80
and 160 milligrams per capsule.

Most patients, who have had the medication prescribed by their doctors for
cancer-related pain, only take somewhere in the neighborhood of 160
milligrams a day, but hard-core addicts are developing habits of up to 800
milligrams a day. The police department in Gilbert, W.Va., reported that
OxyContin is the "worst" drug it has ever encountered. An ex-cop from
Detroit, who saw crack cocaine hit the ghettos there, called Oxy "a nuclear
bomb."

The problem has become such a cause for concern that in June, the state of
West Virginia sued the drug's manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, for marketing
the drug deceptively and too aggressively to doctors, failing to adequately
warn of potential abuse and thereby leading to social havoc.

Such alarmist reports and litigious stupidities have got us spooked. The
unfortunate effect of the suit is likely that Oxy either would be made
illegal or the frequency of its prescription severely curtailed. This, of
course, would solve nothing, and Oxy would go the way of medical marijuana.
Addicts still would steal and deal Oxy, because it's unavailability has
made its price skyrocket on the street. Meanwhile, patients who need it
would be deprived, even more than they already are, of their fundamental
right to regulate their own relief.

But there might be another outcome. Maybe, just maybe, this Oxy mess will
force us to confront not only the futility and profligacy of the war on
drugs, but also the downright unconstitutionality of it. For, as Roe vs.
Wade supporters always are telling us, what people do with or put into
their own bodies, so long as it harms no one else, is none of Uncle Sam's
business.

The government's hypocritical and arbitrary regulation of controlled
substances continues to be one of the grossest invasions of privacy ever
perpetrated on the American people. In the upcoming Oxy litigation, the
collective protests of cancer patients and other chronic sufferers probably
will fall on deaf ears, just as they did in the case for medical marijuana.