OXYCONTIN'S IMPACT 'MIND-BOGGLING'

Prescription Drug Plague Claimed Five Men In One Parish

GLACE BAY - These are the names meticulously penned in the columns of Rev.
John Graham's big green ledger of death:

Robbie and Jimmy MacDonald - Jimmy found slumped in a snow bank on
Valentine's Day, Robbie dead in his apartment when they went to tell him
his older brother was gone.

David Sweet died in Ontario, but his sickness started here.

Kenny MacDonald, found dead on the chesterfield by his mother, who thought
he was sleeping.

Darryl Francis Boutilier, who lit a match while sniffing gasoline. The
priest searched hard for a spot of intact flesh to dab the sacred oil on
Danny before he died, and finally found a small patch on his shoulder.

Five men in two years from one tiny parish, all of them victims of a new
kind of plague that has swept across this former coal town, bringing a new
source of sorrow to a land with few jobs and less hope.

Drug abuse and alcoholism are not new to Cape Breton but police, health
officials and political leaders say they have never seen anything like what
is happening here now.

"In 30 years, no other drug has ever had this kind of impact - not cocaine,
not heroin, not anything," says police chief Edgar MacLeod.

"The problem is symptomatic of the struggling economy, but that is not the
whole answer. The impact is mind-boggling."

The culprit, all agree, is OxyContin, a powerful prescription painkiller
that creates a heroin-like high when snorted or injected.

Twenty-two people have died in the former coal towns surrounding Sydney in
connection with drug use in the last 18 months. Not all had OxyContin in
their veins, but MacLeod says they all had it in their lives.

Break-ins have doubled in three years, robberies are up 30 per cent and the
number of arrests related to the abuse of prescription drugs has soared
from zero in 2000 to 19 last year. According to health officials, the rate
of OxyContin prescribed by doctors in Cape Breton is three times higher,
per capita, than the rest of the province.

Some of the numbers are hard to pin down; some even suggest officials
exaggerate the drug problem for political effect, but it is impossible to
discount the personal experience of Father Graham, a 78-year-old priest who
grew up in the town of Dominion just over the hill from Glace Bay.

Graham himself was addicted to pills 35 years ago and almost died of an
overdose. He has worked in the local detox since it opened, and ministers
at the regional jail.

Suffice to say, he's been around, is no newcomer to the world of desolation
and drug use, knows the smell of grief inside the small clapboard homes
clustered at the head of every closed mine. Yet even Graham says the scale
of the current drug problem is beyond imagination.

One example: A young man recently held a knife to the priest in the foyer
of his own rectory.

"I can't remember ever having a funeral for an overdose death before
OxyContin came to Cape Breton," he says.

"But in two years, I've had five funerals for men who all lived within a
quarter-mile of here. It's a very small parish, and it's a very big problem."

THEY CALL IT COTTONLAND

Just a few blocks away from Graham's big, white Holy Cross Church, across
the bridge and past the pizza parlour, is a stretch of pavement that
dealers and users constantly patrol. The nickname - Cottonland - is a play
on the pronunciation "oxee-cotton" of the drug that has seized so many
local souls.

It is not hard to find someone to talk about drugs here; it bubbles up in
conversation instantly.

"It sucks; the only thing to do here is drugs - alcohol and Oxy." It is the
first thing John Boutilier says when asked about life in Glace Bay.

Six days out of his second trip to detox, Boutilier, 21, is strolling
through Cottonland with Ryan Gardiner, the only friend he says he could
find this morning who wasn't already high.

They're eager to talk, not afraid of using their names or having their
pictures taken, keen to tell the rest of Canada what it is like when home
feels like hell. A few details:

The pain in your joints when you start to withdraw from the drug, stinging,
fiery stabs of agony in the elbows and the knees.

The way the drug takes over your life. Boutilier stole $100,000 from
relatives to feed his habit. One man beat up his terminally ill girlfriend
to get her drugs. Another friend stole the money set aside for his father's
headstone.

"It's hard to explain," Boutilier says. "My mother was diagnosed with
cancer. She might be dying, and it was like I didn't even care.

"All I cared about was my next dose."

It is almost impossible to avoid, they say - Oxy is everywhere.

Last month, the 65-year-old widow of a coal miner was convicted of dealing
OxyContin out her kitchen door.

"My biggest regret is not leaving Cape Breton," says Gardiner, 22.

"My advice to anyone is to get as far away from Cape Breton as you can. If
you're not on Oxy here, somebody is trying to get you on it. I've been to
Halifax and New Brunswick. It's not like that there."

Boutilier started smoking dope when he was 14 and moved quickly to pills.
He can't remember when he first started on Oxy but vividly remembers when
he first shot it straight into his veins.

It was the promise of treatment that led him to "banging," as injecting
drugs is called here.

His brother, Eddie Buchanan, kicked his OxyContin habit with the help of a
methadone program. Boutilier wanted to join the program, too, but was told
only injection drug users were eligible.

"I was dead against it, never wanted nothing to do with it," Boutilier says
of using needles. "But I really wanted help."

Buchanan remembers the night. He promised his baby brother he would go over
and stick needles in his arm to mimic track marks so that Boutilier could
get into the treatment program, but when he arrived, Boutilier was slumped
on the couch. He had done the real thing.

"I tried it once and thought, 'Whoa, look what I've been missing!' "
Boutilier says of shooting up for the first time.

"I just looked at him," says his brother. "I said, 'John, what have you
done?' "

Buchanan is an icon of hope to the legions of Cape Bretoners who are slaves
to OxyContin.

Buchanan, 26, girlfriend Mary Hurley, and their three children, Brady, 7,
Brooke, 3, and Dylan, 6, are survivors of the plague. Three years ago,
Buchanan had lost 60 pounds and was regularly waking up wet with his own
feces and vomit. Relatives, backed by social services, stepped in and took
the kids away. Buchanan had tried local detox programs five times, but
always went back to the drug.

"I'd get clean, then I'd go looking for work, dropping off hundreds of
resumes, go to job fairs, interviews, but nothing. And I'd go back to it.
Finally I just said, 'I've had enough.' "

Two years ago, he enrolled in a methadone program in Halifax. He returned
15 months ago and, except for the daily dose of methadone he takes each
morning, is still clean.

ESCAPING ADDICTION

In Cottonland, Buchanan is a legend, his story offered up to a stranger
again and again.

Buchanan doesn't have a job and his teeth are rotted brown from drugs, but
he once again lives in a home filled with baby Brooke's giggles and Brady's
questions.

The couple has hung a lace canopy over the little girl's pink bed, filled
up the toy box in the boys' room, arranged the stuffed toys just so. The
rhythms of normal life once again prevail.

Hurley has made it her personal crusade to get a methadone program in Cape
Breton like the one in Halifax that saved her family.

"We need help here," she says. "We need a program."

She is convinced that the OxyContin problem is much worse than even the
most anxious officials proclaim. Although only 26, a box she keeps in her
closet is filled with the obituaries of close friends.

"There is not a friend I have who isn't a junkie," she says. "Not one."

Hurley believes that several of them died trying to mimic Buchanan's
success at getting off the drug.

Robbie MacDonald tried to get into treatment this winter, she says, and was
mixing methadone and OxyContin the night he died.

"They try to do it on their own and don't realize that can kill you," she
says. "Robbie was trying to get off it, I know for a fact that he was."

Hurley points out that it isn't just those with little education and little
opportunity who have been swept up by the plague. Buchanan's family is well
off, she says, runs its own business. She herself is the niece of John
Morgan, mayor of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, which includes
Sydney, Glace Bay and other communities.

The new scourge of drug use, Morgan says, is directly connected to the
devastating impact of the end of the coal era.

Coal was not just the heart of the Cape Breton economy, it was the heart of
the Cape Breton culture for more than 100 years. Miners had their own
music, their own jargon, even their own unique card games devised deep
underground.

The federal government shut the last mine almost three years ago. The
provincial government shut the steel plant not long after. There are
thousands of new call-centre jobs in Cape Breton but they pay half the
wages of mining, and unemployment is still near 20 per cent.

"We were betrayed; the provincial government led the stampede out of here,"
Morgan says.

"The OxyContin things is really tied into the economy. We need dramatic
change here, or we simply won't survive."

It's hard to find anyone who disagrees.

"Why would anyone be surprised by this?" asks Father Robert Neville, a
Roman Catholic priest who worked in Cape Breton for many years.

"Why would anyone wonder at the increase in crime, in drug abuse, domestic
violence? The coal miners were only one small group affected by the
economic, social and emotional depression that followed the shutdown of the
coal industry."

Even those battling the drug in Cottonland agree.

Gardiner studied metal fabricating, but never managed to get a job in the
field. He has a job lined up at a fish plant this summer, then plans to
move to Alberta.

He says he is one of the few men his age who has resisted the lure of Oxy,
who hasn't succumbed to the addiction.

Still, he doesn't blame his friends, and sees their addiction as a question
of circumstance, not volition.

"If you have work, that's your detox right there; when you go to work, you
feel good," he says.

"If we all grew up in different places, we would all have different
stories. The further you stay away from here, the better."

Hurley is very chipper for a woman who has lost so many friends, who was on
and off the drug herself for years. She has a wide smile and a deep well of
hope. What she hopes is that something is done to help the people of her
home, the people whom she loves.

"If there were a mining disaster and 10 men died, it would be a national
disaster," she says.

"But here we have kids dying every week.

"This is a huge disaster, a huge tragedy, and nobody's doing anything."

SIDEBAR

OXYCONTIN FACTS

Facts about the recent rise in OxyContin drug abuse: - What is OxyContin? A
narcotic painkiller derived from opium and used to ease moderate to severe
pain.

- - When was OxyContin introduced? Purdue Pharma first brought the drug to
market in 1996 and it had sales exceeeding $1 billion in the United States
in 2002.

- - Street names: Hillbilly heroin, green monsters, cotton.

- - What is double-doctoring? Individuals, who may or may not have legitimate
illnesses and requiring a doctor's prescription, visit many doctors to
acquire large amounts of controlled substances.

- - How many have died? At least six deaths have been attributed to OxyContin
abuse in Newfoundland within the last year. Three recent deaths in Cape
Breton are blamed on prescription abuse, but OxyContin has not been
specifically named.

- - What are authorities doing? A community based task force has been set up
in Cape Breton. The Newfoundland government has set up a similar task force.

- - Legal implications: Purdue Pharma is facing more than a dozen lawsuits
from patients in the U.S., claiming they have become addicted to the
painkiller, and others blaming the company for abusers' overdoses and deaths.