OXYCONTIN CREATES CONTROVERSY AMONG USERS AND PHARMACIES

Some people with chronic pain have to lean on powerful prescription drugs
just to get through the day. Life can be unbearable without them. In
tonight's cover story, CNN's Bill Delaney on how legitimate drug users may
have to go without, because of drug abusers.

BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: Some people with chronic pain have to lean on
powerful prescription drugs just to get through the day. Life can be
unbearable without them. In tonight's cover story, CNN's Bill Delaney on
how legitimate drug users may have to go without, because of drug abusers.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL DELANEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): One of at least 37 robberies
of the painkiller OxyContin in just the past six months in
Massachusetts. Amid a crime wave in several states -- Kentucky,
Pennsylvania, Maine -- thefts of a drug some say can cause a high like heroin.

Stigmatizing the pill, Tom Cabral says doesn't make him high, but did make
his life worth living again. Dulling severe pain he'd endured for more
than seven years in the wake of a car accident.

TOM CABRAL, USES OXYCONTIN: It changed my outlook on life. The OxyContin
helps me get through the day with, you know, as minimal pain as possible.
Without feeling that, you know, I'm getting my gut kicked in every time I walk.

DELANEY: What Tom Cabral and millions of other chronic pain sufferers now
fear, OxyContin-related crime making the prescription drug harder to get
because of abusers like Scott Barrett who says he became addicted.

SCOTT BARRETT, ADDICT: I would take, you know, four or five, depending on
the milligrams at once, and chew them up. You know, you get 60 or 80
milligrams of this stuff, it's pretty potent.

DELANEY: Lost, says Tom Cabral, amid allegations that the drug can even be
deadly in high enough doses, is that he's experienced only pain relief, not
a high when he swallows, not chews, two time- released, 20-milligram pills,
three times a day, as he has for three years.

CABRAL: I'm not, you know, strung out. I don't jones when I don't have
them. You know, I don't get high off of them. I take them as I'm prescribed.

DELANEY: Taking them as prescribed, though, is getting more difficult.

(on camera): Shaw's supermarkets here in the Massachusetts area, which
include 52 pharmacies, no longer stock OxyContin after two robberies in
Maine and one in Boston.

(voice-over): Since pharmacies are required by state law to provide all
legal drugs, Shaw's says it will offer OxyContin but only to customers who
prearrange a time-specific pickup.

BERNARD ROGEN, SHAW'S SUPERMARKETS: We just don't want to carry surpluses
in the store at any time.

DELANEY: Confronting the fact that though retail OxyContin can cost as
little as $50 a bottle, black market OxyContin can cost as much as $1,000 a
bottle. Crime, now discouraging some doctors from prescribing it.

JAMES HINES, PURDUE PHARMA: We already know that certain patients in some
sectors of the country are starting to suffer because of the attention on
the abuse of OxyContin.

DELANEY: What worries millions like Tom Cabral.

CABRAL: It puts a stigma on us like we're the bad people. I can't go tell
someone "Oh, I, you know, I take OxyContin." because the first thing
they'll think of is all the negative image, the heroin high, the heroin high?

DELANEY: Sufferers of severe pain say the only high is simply not feeling
so agonizingly low.

Bill Delaney, CNN, Boston.

(END VIDEOTAPE)