ALARM OVER ABUSE OF NEW DRUG

Addicts Circumventing Time-Release Feature Of Oxycontin

Lexington, Ky. -- Harried police detectives in dozens of rural areas in
Eastern states are combatting what they say is a growing wave of drug abuse
involving a potent painkiller prescribed for terminal cancer patients and
other people with severe pain.

Addicts favor the drug because they have learned to circumvent its slow,
time-released protection and achieve a sudden, powerful morphine-like high.
People crush the pills into powder and snort it, or inject it to get a
euphoric high. It sells on the illegal drug market for up to $100 a pill.

The drug has led to an increase in crime in eastern Kentucky, said Hazard
Police Chief Rod Maggard. He estimated that 90 percent of the thefts and
burglaries in Hazard are to get money to buy more pills.

In a detox center in Ashland, about 75 percent of the patients treated over
the past 18 months have used OxyContin, said Bill Stewart, a supervisor for
the regional mental health agency.

OxyContin is often covered under health care plans. The abuse of the drug,
which has been tracked over the past 18 months, has set off a wave of
pharmacy break-ins, emergency room visits and arrests of physicians and
other health care workers.

Illicit dealers have used suffering patients as well as fakers, authorities
report, to "doctor shop" to obtain the drug, OxyContin, for resale.

Along with Kentucky, officials have cited a troubling number of cases in
Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Maine and Ohio, according
to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center.

DEA officials in San Francisco and Washington D.C. told The Chronicle
yesterday that there did not appear to be widespread reports of abuse of
OxyContin in Northern California.

"Heck, we already know it's pretty epidemic down here," said Capt. Minor
Allen of the Hazard police in southeastern Kentucky, where 207 reported
dealers and users were arrested this week in the biggest drug-abuse raid in
state history.

The abuse first drew alarm in Maine 18 months ago in rural, eastern areas
not previously known for having drug problems, according to Jay P.
McCloskey, the U.S. attorney for Maine.

"What is most unusual and disturbing is the number of high school kids and
those in their early 20s who got addicted," said McCloskey, noting that his
small state was one of the largest consumers of OxyContin on a per-capita
basis.

Joseph L. Famularo, the U.S. attorney in the eastern district of Kentucky
who helped lead the Kentucky raid, said, "I personally counted 59 deaths
since January of last year that local police attributed to addicts using
the drug, and I suspect that's pretty conservative."

That number was disputed by the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma of Norwalk, Conn.

"I'm concerned about inflammatory statements like that," said Dr. J. David
Haddox, the medical director for Purdue Pharma. He emphasized that overdose
deaths typically involve multiple factors like alcohol, and that
exaggeration of abuses might cause physicians to deny the drug to suffering
cancer patients.

But authorities express little doubt that the abuse of OxyContin is spreading.

"The graph is spiking," said Robert Crouch, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke,
Va., where 100 local, state and federal law enforcement officials met
Wednesday to discuss the mounting problem of OxyContin abuse there.

On Thursday, authorities said that at least 28 people in Virginia had died
from overdoses of OxyContin in the past two years, and medical officials
said that that number would easily double as coroners examine an additional
100 deaths.

Chronicle staff writer Henry Lee and the Associated Press contributed to
this report.