NARCOTIC MAY BE 'NEW' OXYCONTIN

St. Louis - Justin Knox bit down on the patch, instantly releasing
three days' worth of a drug more powerful than morphine. He was dead
before he 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 dis pense
the med icine 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.

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.

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

Emergency-room visits by peo ple 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.

The first fentanyl patch was Duragesic, made by Johnson & Johnson.
Mark Wolfe, spokesman for PriCari, the J&J unit that oversees
Duragesic, said the product comes with warnings about the dangers of
abusing Duragesic. One theory is that addicts are turning to the
fentanyl patch because of a government crackdown on abuse of another
powerful prescription painkiller, OxyContin, or oxycodone.