CLARK SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT ATTACKING TRAFFICKING FROM INTERNET DRUG SALES

Clark County Deputy Sheriff Joseph Gurley slipped on a yellow shirt
with a red collar and a DHL logo emblazoned on the chest, a pair of
gray short pants and received a crash course in how to deliver a
package to somebody's door. If one didn't know better, he could have
passed for a DHL employee. That was the whole idea.

Gurley's undercover ruse was part of a snare that Capt. Arlen Horton
of the sheriff's department hoped would result in half a dozen arrests
for trafficking drugs that were bought from on online pharmacy.

A short time later, with Horton observing from his pickup truck and
videotaping his arrival, Gurley walked to an apartment building on
Oxford Drive carrying a yellow package containing 60 Xanax pills and
disappeared inside the front door. Audio of the encounter crackled on
a speaker in Horton's truck from a microphone that he had hidden in
the apartment with the help of an informant who lived there. The
delivery deception was underway.

Horton had reason to suspect at least six members of the same family
were trafficking Lortabs - a powerful prescription painkiller - and
Xanax, which is another controlled substance popular among drug users.
Five members of the family lived in Powell County, beyond Horton's
jurisdiction. However, Horton had discovered that one member of the
family, a 32-year-old woman living in Winchester, had accepted a
package of prescription drugs that was mistakenly delivered to her
home. When Horton found out about it he charged her with obtaining a
controlled substance by fraud. Facing criminal charges, Horton said
the woman agreed to help him catch other members of her family.

(The Sun is not identifying her because she is part of an ongoing
investigation into drug trafficking in Clark County.)

Setting up a sting at the woman's apartment, the plan unfolded as
intended. Gurley delivered the package of pills, addressed to the
informant's 23-year-old niece, who arrived at the apartment shortly
before Gurley, and she signed for the package.

Once Gurley had left, the niece, according to plan, allegedly sold the
informant 30 of the Xanax pills for $120. She paid for the pills with
six $20 bills that Horton had marked prior to the transaction. The
niece was accompanied by her 23-year-old boyfriend and her two
children, one an infant, the other 3 years old.

With that transaction, Horton was able to file charges of trafficking
a controlled substance against the niece and her boyfriend.

As the suspect left the apartment building's parking lot, Gurley -
still driving the borrowed DHL delivery van - Horton and Sgt. Brian
Caudill quickly moved in, blocking the couple's escape. Horton
recovered the remaining Xanax pills and the six marked $20 bills.
Although the woman and her boyfriend were taken in for questioning and
warrants for their arrest have since been issued, the warrants have
not been served and the couple remains free.

'It's a complete travesty ...'

When Winchester police were called to 352 Hill Street on July 12,
2004, for a report of a drug overdose, it didn't come as a surprise to
Winchester Detective Tom Beall. Beall was aware that Eddie Gayhart,
46, was receiving multiple deliveries of prescription drugs each week
from Internet pharmacies.

"I actually have him on audiotape telling our informant that he was
snorting 40 Lortabs a day," Beall recalled.

By the time the first officers arrived on the scene, Gayhart was dead.
His autopsy revealed a potentially lethal quantity of methadone, as
well as cocaine, opiates, Lortab and Xanax. Police say there is reason
to believe that some of the drugs that killed Gayhart may have come
from online pharmacies.

As prescription narcotics become easier to obtain, police predict more
people are likely to die from overdoses.

When Clark County Sheriff Ray Caudill began his career as a police
officer 26 years ago, the war on drugs typically was fought against
dealers who obtained marijuana or cocaine - occasionally LSD - from
clandestine suppliers and then trafficked the drugs in parks, back
alleys or behind closed doors. Today, his department spends most of
its time going after dealers whose drugs were purchased on the
Internet and arrived at their front doors in nondescript sealed envelopes.

The Internet - with cyberpharmacies that sell narcotics openly without
a prior prescription, without a face-to-face visit with a physician
and often with few questions asked - has made it a relatively simple
matter for anyone from professionals to teenagers to order
prescription drugs that are delivered to Clark County homes or picked
up at delivery service hubs in Lexington or Stanton. Often those drugs
- - particularly Lortabs and Xanax - are later sold on the street.

"This is a joke. It's a complete travesty that somebody can actually
do that," Caudill said with seeming disgust.

Horton, who is Caudill's chief drug investigator, agreed.
"Prescription drugs are our biggest seller in the county right now,"
he said.

The numbers are staggering. Horton pulled a stack of papers out of a
file on his desk at the sheriff's department and scanned over a list
of names and addresses. It contained known prescription drug
deliveries that FedEx made to residences in Clark County during May.

During that time, FedEx documented 423 packages believed to contain
prescription drugs purchased from online pharmacies to Clark County
addresses. That number doesn't include UPS or DHL deliveries to Clark
County, nor does it include the number of packages containing drugs
that were picked up by Clark County residents at the out-of-county
delivery hubs in order to avoid detection.

"If you have a computer literate 10, 12-year-old child, they are able
to get on the Internet and order narcotics, pain medication, Xanax,
Lortabs, Loricets," Horton claimed. "You can order almost anything
that is a Schedule III narcotic off the Internet. And it's so easy
that a child who is computer literate can do it."

Beall echoed Horton's frustrations. "It's very easy. A lot of people
actually go to the public library, get online and they might do one
consultation. Some of them might acquire an MRI to be sent to them and
they'll send them so many Lortabs C.O.D."

Horton maintains between 30 and 100 packages containing prescription
drugs are delivered to Clark County addresses every day. Hundreds of
people from Clark County, he said, are buying prescription medications
from online pharmacies. However, merely receiving a shipment of drugs
from an online pharmacy is not a violation of any law. So unless law
enforcement officers have evidence that the drugs are being
trafficked, they are powerless to do anything about the steady flow of
prescription narcotics into Clark County.

And they complain that there are too many dealers in Clark County, too
many Internet suppliers and not enough law enforcement officers to put
an end to it.