'HILLBILLY HEROIN' BRINGS ROBBERS TO PHARMACIES THEY TAKE ONLY THE OXYCONTIN

Weymouth, Mass. -- On the afternoon of the Fourth of July, a slow business
day, a young man walked into the Walgreens on this town's main thoroughfare
and said he had a gun. He did not want money. All he wanted was OxyContin,
1,100 pills of the powerful prescription painkiller, which would be worth
tens of thousands of dollars on the street.

It was the latest in a series of 14 robberies of pharmacies in Boston and
its suburbs in the last six weeks. The robbers have ignored cash registers
and other drugs and taken only OxyContin, which gives a heroin-like high
without the needles or the stigma.

The holdups in the Boston area are part of a surge in OxyContin robberies
and thefts at drugstores in several states, from Maine and Vermont in New
England to Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky in the nation's
midsection, and as far south as Florida and as far west as California.

"These robberies are surprising to us," said Michael Moy, chief of the drug
operations section of diversion control for the Drug Enforcement
Administration. "Usually if people are going to rob a pharmacy, they are
going to ask for all the controlled substances, or ask for money in the
cash register."

The surge in OxyContin robberies, Moy said, seems to reflect the high price
the drug now commands on the street and its powerfully addictive high. The
street value is $1 a milligram, and the pills, manufactured by Purdue
Pharma LP, come in doses of 10, 20, 40, 80 and 160 milligrams.

In the Boston-area robberies, only one arrest has made, that of an
18-year-old identified by the police as Shawn Noonan, who was charged on
Monday with armed robbery in suburban Peabody.

James Pierce, who is chief of detectives in Winchester and head of a
regional law enforcement task force on the drugstore robberies, said he
believed that about 85 percent of the robberies in the area were being
committed by the same group of young men.

"They follow the identical pattern, and they know what they're doing,"
Pierce said.

"They work in teams of two or three, brandishing firearms, and they order
the customers in the store to the ground, while one guy goes to the counter
and demands the OxyContin," he said.

Nobody has been injured or shot, Pierce said. But the robberies have caused
deep concern around Boston. On Tuesday, two of the largest supermarket
chains in New England, Shaws and Star Market, announced that they would
stop carrying OxyContin in their pharmacies. Customers will still be able
to fill their OxyContin prescriptions, but they will have to wait up to
three days while a supply is ordered, a spokesman said. Shaws and Star
Market are owned by J. Sainsbury, Britain's second-largest supermarket company.

At the small Hingham Centre Pharmacy in Hingham, a suburb just south of
Weymouth, Paul Mabey, the pharmacist and co-owner, had signs printed for
the front widow and on the counter: "For everyone's safety, we no longer
stock the painkiller OxyContin."

"I thought people were becoming afraid to come in, because of the
robberies, " Mabey said.

His fellow owner disagreed, saying the signs themselves were scaring people
and causing too much comment.

He took the signs down. But the store no longer stocks OxyContin and
instead orders it from a supplier to fill a prescription.

In the past month, there have also been robberies of OxyContin in
pharmacies in Manchester, Vt.; Roseland, Fla.; Cudahy, Wis.; and Overland Park,

Kan., the local police said.

Moy, of the DEA, said the OxyContin robberies seemed to cluster in certain
states. Among those with the most serious problem of pharmacy robberies
since last October, he said, were Kentucky, with 55, or 5.5 percent, of its
1,000 drugstores, and Maine with 12, or 4 percent, of its 300 drugstores.

Florida, with 63, and Pennsylvania, with 71, reported the most OxyContin
robberies, Moy said. New York has recorded 21 such incidents since October,
he said, and California has reported 26, though both states have many more
pharmacies than the other states.

Police Capt. Jim Thomas in Weymouth, where the robbery took place at the
Walgreens on July Fourth, said he was receiving a quick education in the
abuse of OxyContin.

"They call it the hillbilly heroin," Thomas said, because of its popularity
in Kentucky, West Virginia and southwestern Virginia, as well as rural
parts of Maine.

"By having it, it's like having cash in your hand," he said. "You can sell
it easily on the street. We've even got reports of it being sold in
Weymouth," an old middle- and working-class town on Massachusetts Bay south
of Boston.

While OxyContin is designed to release its active ingredient, oxycodone,
over 12 hours, abusers can get an immediate high by crushing the pills and
snorting or injecting the drug.

In Bowling Green, Ky., employees of Apothecare Pharmacy, got tired of being
targets last year after thieves twice stole their supply of OxyContin. So
the workers filled two large bottles of OxyContin with leftover Halloween
candy and left them as decoys.

In May, the burglars struck again, and made off with the candy.