DRUG SCOURGE WORSENS

Appalachian Virginia's Soaring Crimes Rates Linked To Growing Number Of
Oxycontin Addicts

TAZEWELL - They shoplift underwear. They swipe their grandmothers' wedding
rings, empty their neighbors' gun cabinets and rip the chrome wheels off
strangers' cars.

Drug junkies have turned a wide swath of Appalachia into a den of thieves,
selling stolen goods to feed their addictions and driving up the crime rate
in Virginia's mountain communities even as the state is enjoying a
decade-long drop in crime.

Five years after sheriffs and prosecutors first noticed that abusers of
OxyContin and other prescription drugs were creating an epidemic of lawless
behavior, data compiled by state and federal law-enforcement officials show
the situation has worsened.

Bucking a statewide trend, robbery, burglary and larceny are on the rise in
large parts of Appalachian Virginia. Increasingly, in counties such as
Buchanan, Tazewell and Lee - the three counties where the illegal use of
OxyContin first surfaced - residents are waking to find their televisions
are missing, their lawn chairs are gone, their guitars, wristwatches and
sneakers have disappeared.

"They'll grab anything that they can market," said Buchanan Chief Deputy
Randal Ashby, "TVs, VCRs, money out of houses, jewelry, lawnmowers,
Weed-eaters - anything they can pick up and run with."

"They'll steal lawnmowers, four-wheelers, guns, jewelry, whatever they can
get their hands on," said Maj. Jimmy Woodard of the Lee Sheriff's
Department. "They'll steal checkbooks and write checks to pay for their
drug habit."

The increase in crime is creating crowded jails, taxing the abilities of
sheriffs' departments and prosecutors' offices, and threatening to
overwhelm the area's courts.

The five-year trend is also a disturbing development because,
traditionally, Appalachian Virginia's low crime rate has been a source of
pride. Noted for its high unemployment, pockets of poverty and poor health
care, the area could at least boast of being partially immune from the
crime that bedevils big cities.

But those bragging rights are now in jeopardy. In hardscrabble Buchanan
(pop. 24,795), the crime rate has jumped from 1,483 crimes per 100,000
residents in 1998 to 3,731 in 2002, the last year for which the Virginia
State Police statistics are available.

The number of burglaries has jumped from 113 in 1998 to 213 in 2002; the
number of larcenies (anything from pick-pocketing to shoplifting to
stealing a bicycle from the curb) jumped from 225 to 343.

In rural Lee (pop. 21,445), the crime rate soared from 1,438 crimes per
100,000 residents in 1998 to 4,049 in 2002. Larcenies jumped from 161 in
1998 to 281 in 2002, while burglaries increased from 111 to 182.

And in Tazewell (pop. 28,346), the crime rate increased from 2,834 crimes
per 100,000 residents in 1998 to 4,819 crimes in 2002, fueled by a rise in
the number of thefts: from 155 burglaries in 1998 to 204 in 2002, and from
323 larcenies to 454.

The crime rate also rose in neighboring counties in the five years, nearly
doubling in Scott, more than doubling in Russell and Wise, and more than
tripling in Dickenson.

The dramatic increase in crime comes even as five of the seven counties saw
their populations shrink. By contrast, the state's population swelled from
6.79 million in 1998 to 7.29 million in 2002, yet the number of major
crimes (murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary and larceny) dropped from
248,576 to 229,039 in 2002. During that time, the state's crime rate
dropped from 3,660 crimes per 100,000 residents to 3,140.

Officials universally point to one major cause for the dramatic difference
between the state's declining crime rate and the rising rates in the
Appalachia counties: OxyContin.

"You can describe it as Prohibition time in Southwest Virginia with the
drug problem, and OxyContin is the drug of choice," said Ashby, of Buchanan.

"Seventy-five to 85 percent of the felony cases in Tazewell involve drugs,
thefts or crimes to get drugs, and Oxy is still the most popular drug,"
said Dennis Lee, Tazewell County's prosecutor.

OxyContin, also known as Oxy and O.C., is a powerful painkiller intended to
ease the suffering of those in moderate to acute pain. An opiate, like
morphine and heroin, it provides relief for up to 12 hours, and thousands
of patients nationwide call it a miracle drug that gave them back their lives.

The federal government approved its sale in 1996, and by the following year
abusers in far Southwest Virginia had discovered that they could achieve a
heroinlike high by crushing the tablets, then chewing, snorting or
injecting the powder.

The drug, which contains oxycodone, is highly addictive. Woodard said he
has seen cases where junkies have had their teeth pulled in order to get a
dentist to prescribe OxyContin.

"Other people have broken their bones to get Oxy," Woodard said. "You think
you've seen everything, but you haven't."

Initially, OxyContin sold illegally for $1 per milligram, meaning a single
80 mg pill cost an addict $80. But the crackdown on the illicit
prescription drug trade - seven Southwest Virginia doctors have been
convicted - has forced the price up to $1.50 per milligram.

Since some abusers take up to four 80 mg tablets at a time, they need $480
to feed their habit, a cost that prompts them to hold up convenience
stores, steal from their friends and rob their families.

"I've had to put bars on the windows and doors," said the owner of one
grocery store in Pounding Mills, in Tazewell, who spoke only on the
condition that his name not be used.

"The store's been robbed twice in the last year. Two guys are in jail, and
I was in court during the preliminary hearing when they admitted they
needed the money for OxyContin. I've got another store in this general
area, and it was robbed by two kids with a knife. They took the money and
walked a quarter of a mile to a dealer's house and spent it on drugs -
OxyContin."

Tazewell is at ground zero of the crime surge, said Sheriff H.F. Caudill.
He noted that Tazewell accounts for 61.3 percent of all Circuit Court cases
in the four-county judicial district composed of Tazewell, Russell,
Buchanan and Dickenson counties. A grand jury that met May 18 handed down
182 indictments, he added, a record.

And the county jail, he said, now houses 218 inmates, though it was built
to accommodate fewer than 90. "I'd say 85 percent of them are in there for
selling drugs or doing something to get'em," said 30-year-old inmate Ray
Nesbitt, serving time for assaulting an officer. Nesbitt said he volunteers
to pick up trash on the county's roads to spend time away from the crowded
jail.

Tazewell sends another 20 to 30 prisoners to jails outside the area,
Caudill said.

Caudill's office is on the town of Tazewell's Main Street, which bisects an
old-fashioned downtown with a few banks, a library, a church, a furniture
and appliance store, a barbershop, a courthouse and, handling the
burgeoning criminal case load, the offices of no fewer than 27 lawyers.

"Our number of lawyers in the last five or six years, I won't say it's
mushroomed, but it has grown significantly," said longtime Main Street
lawyer Stephen Arey. "There's enough work to keep everybody busy."

Indeed, Caudill said the number of inmates means his department is
understaffed by 32 deputies, as computed according to state standards. Lee,
the prosecutor, noted that the number of people on probation in Tazewell is
approaching 1,000, a significant number in such a rural county.

In neighboring Buchanan, Chief Deputy Ashby said the jail is currently
housing nearly double its capacity of 34 inmates, and the county has to
spend up to $8,000 each month to ship other inmates to jails in Dublin and
as far away as Roanoke.

The sheriff's department is also stretched thin, he said. Buchanan once
belonged to a four-county task force created specifically to tackle the
area's drug crimes, but had to pull out to focus on the growing trade and
related crime inside Buchanan. "There's just so much of a drug problem here
that it's too much to take on somebody else's drug problem."

In Lee, 82 inmates currently reside in a jail built to hold 32, said
Woodard, estimating that up to 95 percent of all felony crime in Lee is
connected to drugs.

In Lee, he said, guns are the favorite target of drug addicts looking for
something to steal. In a strategy aimed at exploiting that propensity, Lee
asked agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives for help. Because it is a federal crime to sell guns for drugs,
prosecutors have sent 130 people to federal penitentiaries in the past
three years, Woodard said.

And more help is on the way. A regional jail is scheduled to open in Scott
next spring, alleviating the crowding in Lee and elsewhere.

The state is also working to ease the problems brought on by the surge in
crime, separating Buchanan and Tazewell from the other counties and putting
the two in a single probation district, thereby easing the workload of
probation officers. The state has also approved a fourth circuit judge for
the four-county judicial circuit. That judge is to begin hearing cases next
year.

The moves come even as the counties brace for the arrival of a new, generic
form of OxyContin. The generic version is not yet in most pharmacies but
has already appeared on the black market in eastern Kentucky.

"It'll work its way here, " said Ashby, of Buchanan, adding that he sees no
end to the crime wave. "They get hooked on these drugs, and they have to
steal to pay for them."