OXY CRAZE MAKES WAY TO CITIES

BOSTON (AP) - Armed robbers looking for the powerful painkiller
OxyContin have hit a dozen drug stores around Boston over the past
three months - a sign that the ``hillbilly heroin'' has moved into
the urban Northeast.

Gunmen in baseball caps and bandannas over their faces bound a
pharmacist and two clerks with duct tape on Sunday and stole the drug
from Wells Drug in the Boston suburb of Woburn. The same day, another
gun-wielding robber hit Brooks Pharmacy in Somerville.

The robberies come in the wake of reports last year by police,
pharmacists and drug counselors of an alarming incidence of OxyContin
abuse in rural areas of Maine, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio,
Kentucky and Maryland. The drug has been blamed for scores of deaths,
mostly in the South.

Since then, numerous overdoses have also been reported in
Philadelphia and throughout Florida.

``The problem first arose in rural areas. Now it's quickly migrated
to more populous areas,'' said Charles Miller, spokesman for the
National Drug Intelligence Center, part of the U.S. Justice
Department. ``There's a large potential for it to spread very
rapidly.''

OxyContin abuse first exploded in rural Maine and Appalachia because
of the poor economy, a scarcity of cocaine and heroin and large
populations of elderly people who use the drug to relieve the pain of
cancer or other illnesses.

If taken properly, the synthetic morphine is released slowly into the
body, but abusers crush the pills and inhale or inject the powder to
get the same kind of euphoric high that heroin brings. OxyContin has
been linked to at least 120 overdose deaths nationwide.

``In the last six months, we've had a huge increase in the number of
losses resulting from OxyContin,'' said Chuck Young, executive
director of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Pharmacy.
Employee theft has contributed to the problem, he said.

Detective Lt. James Pierce, who heads a group of Massachusetts
detectives investigating the robberies around Boston, said he is
worried that someone is going to get hurt.

``They're obviously getting more brazen,'' Pierce said.

Pharmacists are on edge.

Paul Hackett tells his employees never to be alone in his Weymouth
pharmacy, where someone tried but failed to break in last week.

He said OxyContin should be reclassified so its theft or misuse
brings stiffer penalties, and doctors need to be educated about how
dangerous and addictive the drug is.

``Police on foot patrol can't touch a fraction of what's going on,'' he said.