ADDICTS' LATEST TARGET: FENTANYL PATCHES

Users Bite the Patch, Inject Gel That Contains Synthetic Narcotic

ST. LOUIS - Justin Knox bit down on the bitter-tasting patch,
instantly releasing three days' worth of a drug more powerful than
morphine. He was dead before he even got to the hospital.

The 22-year-old construction worker and addict was another victim in
an apparent surge in U.S. overdoses blamed on abuse of the fentanyl
patch, a prescription-only product that is intended for cancer
patients and others with chronic pain and is designed to dispense the
medicine slowly through the skin. "I cannot tell you the amount of
people I've seen and the creative ways they abuse this drug," said Dr.
Scott Teitelbaum, director of the Florida Recovery Center in
Gainesville, Fla. "Fentanyl has been abused for years. But recently
there has been an increase. I've seen more chewing, squeezing of the
drug off the patch and shooting it up."

Fentanyl, a synthetic narcotic, was introduced in the 1960s, but it
was not until the early 1990s that it became available in patch form.
Last year, the first generic versions of the patch hit the market.

At least seven deaths in Indiana and four in South Carolina since 2005
have been blamed on abuse of the fentanyl patch, along with more than
100 deaths in Florida in 2004. About a week after Knox's death in
Farmington, Mo., in March, a second man in the same county was
prescribed the patch legally and died after injecting himself with the
gel that he had scraped from it. Emergency-room visits by people
misusing fentanyl shot up nearly 14-fold to 8,000 nationwide between
2000 and 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services. The figures do not indicate how many of those ER visits were
because of the patch.

In Missouri, the man accused of illegally selling the fentanyl patch
to Knox has been charged with murder.

"The awareness is just not out there. I had never heard of this
patch," said Knox's mother, Rose Marler. "There's a new generation of
drugs and people just need to be aware."