METHADONE KILLS MORE THAN OXY, MERCER COP SAYS

It's 'Worse Than OxyContin Ever Dreamed Of Being'

Methadone was the murder weapon a Mercer County woman allegedly used to
kill a man in Montcalm in January, according to an indictment handed up
last week.

It's the third methadone killing Detective C.J. Smothers has investigated
in Mercer County in the past year. Methadone has surpassed OxyContin as a
killer drug in that area, he said.

"God, this is worse than OxyContin ever dreamed of being," said Smothers,
of the Southern Regional Drug and Violent Crimes Task Force.

Smothers has been a police officer for 16 years. He has worked on drug task
forces in Southern West Virginia since 1999 - about the time the OxyContin
epidemic started.

OxyContin brought methadone to West Virginia. Since 2001, seven for-profit
methadone clinics have sprung up across the state, selling methadone - a
synthetic opiate that is just as addictive as heroin or OxyContin - mostly
to Oxy addicts.

Methadone is supposed to quell the craving for illegal opiates. The
National Institutes of Health and other respected organizations laud it as
the best treatment for opiate addicts.

But in the wrong hands, it kills easily.

Like the Montcalm death.

The weekend of Jan. 12 started out as "several people sitting around
partying," Smothers said. A woman at the party had some methadone. She'd
gotten it from a doctor in North Carolina, Smothers later found out.
Doctors sometimes prescribe methadone as a painkiller.

"He'd written her a prescription," Smothers said. "It was supposed to be
good for, like, four months - 100 methadone pills per month."

When the methadone made an appearance, some of the partiers decided "enough
of this," Smothers said. "They left. The others continued on through the
night."

The evening unraveled just like every other methadone death Smothers has
ever seen: The victim (whose medical records later showed that he'd never
been exposed to OxyContin, methadone or anything like it) took the
methadone, probably trying to get high.

The problem with methadone is, you don't feel it right away. So you take
more. At that point, you don't know it, but you're already dead.

An hour or two after you take that fatal dose, you're "in a sound sleep,
snoring very loud, to the point of actually disturbing people in the
house," Smothers said. "That's the body attempting to get air."

That's the final warning. "Normally, in a couple of hours, they're dead."

Methadone killings often filed under suicide, accidental

"The sad part," Smothers said, is that methadone - like OxyContin -
"started out with good intentions. It's not like methamphetamine, cooked up
in the kitchen sink, with no medical purpose for it."

Most days, methadone customers have to go to the clinic and swallow their
doses right there, in front of a nurse. But on weekends, when the clinics
are closed, customers get to take home a dose or two to tide them over
until Monday.

"They're selling their take-home doses," Smothers said. And those doses,
although suitable for seasoned addicts, can be fatal to someone who doesn't
normally take opiates.

Smothers said methadone deaths are tough to investigate.

"If someone buys this stuff on the street, and nobody witnesses them buying
it - or if they OD on their own prescription - they're written off as
accidental drug overdoses or suicides," he said.

Plus, even the police find it nearly impossible to get records from
methadone clinics, to find out if a suspect had access to methadone that
way. Methadone clinics have special privacy protection under federal law,
Smothers said, which regular doctors and hospitals do not.

Right now, for example, Smothers is trying to get records from a methadone
clinic to prove a killing. He got a state subpoena for the records, but the
clinic simply replied with a letter, citing the federal law that says it
doesn't have to give out the records.

"I went to the federal prosecutor and told him I need a federal subpoena,"
Smothers said. "He's looking into it, but he says he's not even sure he'll
be able to get [the records]."

The main reasons Smothers was able to get enough evidence for an indictment
in the Montcalm death was that there were several witnesses at the party,
and the suspect got her methadone from a doctor, not a clinic, he said.

'This is the next big thing'

Smothers said he didn't realize the magnitude of the methadone problem
until a family member of a victim in one of his early methadone cases
pointed him toward an article in last year's Roanoke Times.

Western Virginia, just across the border from Mercer County, has methadone
clinics, too. Methadone overdoses killed 33 people in southwestern Virginia
in the four years from 1997 to 2000, according to the U.S. Department of
Justice. But in 2001, 44 people died from methadone overdoses in western
Virginia in one year alone, the Roanoke Times article stated - more than
the 40 who died from oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin.

By the first quarter of 2002, the article stated, methadone had caused
twice as many deaths as oxycodone - 21 deaths, versus 10.

"This is the next big thing that's coming," Smothers said.

Meanwhile, Mercer County accounts for more opiate arrests than any other
county in the state. And statewide, more and more people are being arrested
for opiates - methadone, OxyContin, Lortab and others.

Offenses involving opiates "started increasing between 2000 and 2001,"
according to an analysis of drug task force arrests published by the state
Criminal Justice Statistical Analysis Center last month. "In 2002, other
opiates increased by 183.8 percent over the previous year."

Besides the seven existing methadone clinics in West Virginia, two more are
slated to open by the end of the year. Five more are pending approval by
the state Health Care Authority - including one in Mercer County.