PILL'S IMPACT LOOMS IN MB

Some still feel effect of drug after pain clinic's close

The man in the camouflage wanted the OxyContin, all of it.

With hands shaking, he put a pistol to one pharmacist's head while another
filled a bag with bottles.

Only one customer, an elderly woman, was browsing in the store that Saturday
afternoon at Northside Pharmacy, where the television was tuned to the
Clemson University vs. University of South Carolina football game.

Bob Hitchcock, one of the owners of the pharmacy, handed the bag to the
robber, who then ordered him and assistant Julia Lorenz to lie face-down on
the floor.

The man escaped through the same back door by which he had entered, leaving
behind two of the earliest known victims of OxyContin, which, three years
later, has claimed hundreds of victims in myriad ways on the Grand Strand.

Some, like Hitchcock and Lorenz, were victims of crimes related to the
potent and popular pain killer.

Others, hundreds, became addicted either through legitimate use of the drug
for pain or through recreational abuse.

Others, a few doctors and their assistants at a small pain-management clinic
in Myrtle Beach, fell prey to the lure of easy money and wrote so many
illegal prescriptions for the highly addictive OxyContin that it skewed the
drug-maker's sales charts and attracted national attention.

One of those doctors, Benjamin Moore, killed himself this past summer.

On Monday, three of the doctors accused will go to trial in federal district
court in Florence.

In a 20-page indictment, the doctors are accused of conspiracy to distribute
controlled substances outside the usual course of medical practice,
distribution of controlled substances for other than legitimate medical
purposes and money laundering.

The trio of defendants is the last of eight doctors and three office
administrators who were charged in connection with the investigation of the
Comprehensive Care and Pain Management Clinic, which the Drug Enforcement
Administration shut down in June 2001. The eight who already have been
convicted pleaded guilty rather than go to trial.

The stories are as varied as the victims. While many of those who obtained
OxyContin through Comprehensive Care and Pain Management were drug abusers,
many were bonafide patients. Attorney John Hilliard represents a couple he
met when the husband came to him wanting two things: to divorce his wife, a
pain patient who had become addicted to OxyContin, and to sue Dr. D. Michael
Woodward, owner of the clinic.

The couple has since salvaged their marriage, Hilliard said.

The effect of the drug wasn't limited to those who worked at or visited the
clinic. The crowds who arrived daily, some in carpools, congregated in the
parking lot of the strip shopping center at 79th Avenue North and North
Kings Highway.

Two doors south of the clinic, many patients waited at Sam's Corner, often
drinking beer until time for their appointment.

Sisters Teresa Crowe and Wendy Suggs, who work 12-hour shifts six days a
week at Sam's, well remember the days when the clinic was in operation.

More than one customer, intoxicated on alcohol or drugs, fell off a bar
stool, they said. "Sometimes we'd have to ask them to leave," Crowe said.

Patients at the clinic filled up the parking lot and clogged the sidewalk.
Woodward, who pleaded guilty, was a daily customer who often ordered the
Ocean burger. "He was a flirty old man," Crowe said. "He didn't act like a
doctor."

Occasionally, a diner would offer to sell drugs to them, and once, when
Suggs hurt her back in a fall, one of the office managers offered to help.
"She said they'd get me plenty of money," Suggs said.

Among the accusations was the charge that the clinic charged Medicare for
tests it never conducted.

Pharmacies all along the Grand Strand were affected by the presence of the
clinic as people from Georgia, North Carolina and points all over South
Carolina filled prescriptions from Woodward's clinic. In addition to
prescriptions for OxyContin, patients normally had several other
prescriptions as well, usually for drugs such as Valium, Percodan, Xanax and
Lorcet, said Ron Mason, one of three owners of Northside Pharmacy.

Since DEA agents closed the clinic two years ago, the number of
prescriptions for OxyContin has declined by about 80 percent, he said, and
the number of out-of-town customers has dropped by 95 percent.

"They would carpool," Mason said. "They would come in four at a time, all
with the same prescription. They came to Myrtle Beach by the hundreds."

"These pills are so expensive; the people who take them are on really good
insurance or they are on public assistance," he said.

At Northside Pharmacy, Medicare and Medicaid paid for about 70 percent of
the prescriptions, which were $300 for 60 40-milligram tablets and $580 for
a month's supply of 80-milligram pills, which patients take twice a day.

The street value has been as high as $1 per milligram, said Mason, whose
store was burglarized about two weeks after the armed robbery.

Lorenz, who was filling in for a co-worker at the pharmacy on the day of the
robbery, hates to hear the name OxyContin. "This was my hometown pharmacy,"
she said. "This was my neighborhood. He came into my stomping grounds to put
fear because he's got a bad habit."

The accused robber, who has not gone to trial, entered the pharmacy through
a back door shortly after Lorenz had arrived for work. The man was wearing a
ski mask, but she recognized him by his camouflage clothing as a man she had
seen in the back parking lot minutes early.

He pointed a gun at her and ordered her to come to him. "I thought it was a
joke," Lorenz said.

He ordered her again, and when she walked to him, he put his left arm around
her neck and put a gun to her head.

She called Hitchcock. "Bob, you need to come out here."

When HItchcock appeared, the man ordered: "I want all your OxyContin and
Dilaudid."

It was Lorenz's suggestion that Hitchcock put the bottles in a bag. After he
had his haul, the man ordered the pharmacist and assistant to lie on the
floor. "That's when I got afraid," she said.

Police captured the man about 10 days later, and they learned that the
robber's weapon had been a pellet gun.

Since the robbery, Lorenz and her husband have bought hand guns. She has
earned firearms certification and obtained a permit to carry a gun. Until
the robbery, she had never fired a gun.

One of the changes at the pharmacy is that now the back door is always
locked. As a reminder, there is a hand-lettered sign taped on it:
"Attention! All Employees. This door is to remained locked at all times."

Lorenz made the sign.