PRESCRIPTION ADDICTIONS

Even as national awareness grows of widespread prescription drug abuse,
Virginia lawmakers want to impede an avenue of treatment.

Among other mischief, Virginia's General Assembly busied itself at this
year's inglorious session with putting up legal roadblocks against drug
treatment centers.

So Virginians will find their options that much more limited should they
discover they must contend with news more dire than that a methadone clinic
plans to open nearby.

The more dire news is that prescription medicines, such as the highly
addictive narcotics OxyContin and Vicodin, now rank as the second-most
abused drugs in the nation, right behind marijuana.

Oh, and a University of Michigan study shows that, nationwide, prescription
drug abuse increased from the 2002 to 2003 school year among eighth-, 10th-
and 12th-graders.

Those youngsters are not getting their drugs at methadone clinics. But they
might need methadone clinics to get free of addiction if their youthful
experimentation runs to OxyContin or other opioids found in the medicine
cabinet at home.

Prescription drug abuse ruins lives, destroys families and generates the
kind of crime that middle-class householders tend to associate only with
street drugs.

How serious is the problem? Serious enough, The New York Times reports, that:

n Congress is considering a bill to ban Internet prescription drug sales
without a visit to a doctor and a prescription.

n The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is seeking
strategies for combating the illegal marketing and abuse of prescription drugs.

n President Bush wants a 4.6 percent increase in the federal budget for
anti-drug programs next year, nine times the average increase for programs
unrelated to defense or national security.

n People are selling their homes to support their habits, according to a
social services director in eastern Kentucky.

Devastating. But that is not news to Virginia lawmakers. Two years ago,
they authorized a pilot program to let police track controlled-drug
prescriptions, and crack down on "doctor shopping," in far Southwest, where
addiction was - and is - rampant.

Sen. William Wampler, R-Bristol, sponsored that bill. This year - driven,
surely, by the same constituent fears - he sponsored the one that bars
methadone clinics within one-half mile of day care centers or elementary or
secondary schools.

Treatment clinics are not the problem, though. They are part of the solution.