SUDAFED? SHOW ID. VICODIN? NO NEED.

While Illinois clamped down on the sale of cold medicine, a teen says
she repeatedly gamed the state's safeguards to buy powerful painkillers

When Victoria Squire, 17, was on the prowl for high-powered narcotic
painkillers, she had little trouble finding a pharmacist willing to
hand them over.

Using a fake name and a prescription forged on a computer, the Villa
Park teen went into one drugstore after another and emerged with a
bottle of Vicodin, usually with no questions asked. On the rare
occasions when pharmacists detected her scam, she said, they'd tell
her to leave rather than call police.

Squire, a recovering crack and heroin addict who said she was
obtaining the painkillers for another person, was finally caught in
February after as many as 30 successful forays. Sitting in a DuPage
County Jail cell, she is still amazed at what she was able to pull off.

"I think it's really ridiculous how easy it is," she said. "The
government, the state, they practically let you get away with it."

Though you need to show a photo ID to buy cold medicine in Illinois,
addictive medications can be obtained with nothing more than an
easily faked prescription slip. Pharmacists aren't legally obligated
to verify an order is genuine, and tamper-proof prescription pads, a
security measure used in other states, are not required here.

It's a system some say is easily gamed, contributing to a plague of
painkiller abuse. According to federal estimates, more than 11
million people--almost 5 percent of those ages 12 and older--used the
drugs outside of a doctor's care during the last year.

"Filling prescriptions has become such a big business now that I
believe at times they're overwhelmed," said Lt. Terry Lemming,
statewide drug enforcement coordinator for the Illinois State Police.
"Because of that, perhaps, they're not as vigilant on reviewing the
prescription as they should be."

There are many ways, experts say, to fraudulently obtain prescription
painkillers, from enlisting the aid of corrupt doctors, pharmacists
or pill-pushing Web sites, to swiping prescription pads or simply
buying the drugs on the street.

Squire began with a ploy known as "doctor shopping." She visited a
series of emergency rooms in the western suburbs complaining of a
toothache or migraine, and though she didn't ask for narcotics,
knowing that would tip off the physician, she usually got them
anyway. "I knew how to play it up so they didn't really get
suspicious," she said.

Squire, whose own drug problems had caused her to leave her parents'
home, said she wasn't getting the medication for herself, but for a
housemate addicted to Vicodin.

In time, Squire said, the housemate came up with a new strategy,
taking a legitimate prescription written by a Naperville internist
and in a few simple steps, producing near-perfect forgeries with a
home computer.

Squire said that to her surprise, even an underage girl dressed in
baggy jeans and rock band T-shirts roused little suspicion.

She said that she visited pharmacies like Target, Wal-Mart, Osco and
CVS, and that the druggist almost always filled her order. When
employees did check with the doctor's office, they would warn Squire,
allowing her to escape.

The Drug Enforcement Administration says 1 in 4 cases of illegally
obtained prescription drugs involves forgery. Under Illinois law,
however, pharmacists are required only to act in good faith when
dispensing a controlled substance. They don't have to confirm the
authenticity of the prescription.

A spokesman for Walgreens, where Squire said she took most of her
prescriptions, said the chain's pharmacists use "professional
judgement" when assessing the veracity of an order. Marlin Weekley,
president of the Illinois Pharmacists Association, said most
druggists are savvy about recognizing bogus prescriptions.

He added that phoning a doctor to check every narcotics order would
be impractical. A pharmacy fills dozens of them every day and
callbacks already can take hours, imposing a heavy burden upon
honest, suffering patients, he said.

Even so, some states have tried to curb doctor shopping with
electronic prescription tracking, which allows physicians,
pharmacists and law enforcement to check a patient's history of
obtaining controlled substances.

Illinois has been tracking prescriptions since 2000, but only
so-called Schedule II drugs, such as the powerful painkiller
OxyContin. Vicodin and some other narcotics, classified as Schedule
III medications, are not reviewed. A bill pending in Springfield
would expand monitoring to all controlled substances, but the measure
has yet to leave the House Rules Committee.

Electronic systems can raise an alert if phony prescriptions or a
doctor's DEA license number are in circulation. Yet while the number,
used to confirm a physician's authority to prescribe narcotics, helps
track down doctors who abuse the privilege, it is less useful for
nailing forgers with a slew of aliases.

"It's like people using bad checks. You have to start somewhere with
some real information," said Susan Hofer, spokeswoman for the
Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.

Some states have tried a further safeguard with special prescription
slips for controlled substances. Forms used in Kentucky, Indiana and
elsewhere include such features as watermarks, heat-sensitive ink and
paper that displays the word "VOID" if the form is copied, scanned or faxed.

Squire's pill-gathering spree lasted until Feb. 11, when she went to
a Jewel-Osco in Lombard with a prescription slip bearing a bogus
name. She had gotten Vicodin there before, she said, but this time
sensed the pharmacist's suspicion.

She swallowed her unease and stuck around to get the drugs. But
Lombard police said the pharmacist checked the order with the
doctor's office, and upon learning it was a fake, called authorities.

"When I went to pick it up, they said it would be another 15 or 20
minutes," Squire said. "I went to go find [the housemate] and two
cops stopped me and arrested me."

Charged with forgery and unlawful possession of a prescription
form--felonies carrying a penalty of up to five years in
prison--Squire is now behind bars, hoping to get into a drug court
program that would let her avoid incarceration in exchange for treatment.

Meanwhile, Squire's mother, Liz Cunneen, who lives outside St.
Charles, has been writing to elected officials in Washington, looking
for changes in a system she said has proven all to easy to cheat.
Above all, she wants pharmacies to check IDs when filling
prescriptions for controlled substances, something a growing number
of states require.

Squire said that would have complicated but not derailed her plot.
However, if all the defenses adopted by other states were in place,
she said, the plan would have been too complicated to attempt.

"There might always be a way around the system, but I think it would
diminish it 99 percent," she said. "I don't think being able to do
what I was doing was right."