A DETECTIVE'S MISSION, AN ADDICT'S STRUGGLE

DURHAM - With a radio in his back pocket and a gun beneath his shirt,
Durham County Sheriff's Detective Tom Mellown shuttles between pharmacies,
hunting addicts and forged prescriptions.

Mellown can identify just about every known drug dealer in town. He grew up
here, met his wife here, watched the Durham Bulls play baseball on weekend
nights. For three years, Mellown has worked to crack Durham's drug trade.

Few other prescription drugs before OxyContin, he says, have ever produced
such desperation among addicts.

In 2000, with the help of pharmacists, police nabbed dozens of abusers
passing forged prescriptions.

But an addict named Andrea Ferguson eluded them.

Starting in late 1999 until August 2000, she passed some 60 forged
prescriptions. She started when a friend said, "You have an angel look. No
one will ever question you."

The friend would pose as a patient and steal prescription pads from
doctors' offices and hospitals. Ferguson, 30, who started taking OxyContin
after a car accident, would take the forged prescription to drug stores. An
attractive mother of three, she would make small talk with pharmacists
while her friend kept watch to make sure the police weren't called.

By 2000, Ferguson had perfected her technique. She was able to hide the
sweats and the shakes and the sense of desperation she felt every time she
ran out of OxyContin.

On a weekday afternoon, she was out of pills again. At a Wal-Mart, she
presented a forged prescription for 120 OxyContin tablets.

This time, the pharmacist called police.

She was arrested and charged with obtaining a controlled substance by
fraud. But she served no jail time. Two months later, she was arrested on
identical charges. Again, she served no jail time. Eight months after that,
a third arrest, no jail time.

Then Mellown arrested her and charged her with 19 counts of passing forged
prescriptions.

He told the district attorney and magistrate about Ferguson's history, and
bond was set at $25,000. Ferguson spent 28 hours in jail before she could
gather bail money. She's been indicted and is awaiting trial.

Mellown knows some would argue prison space should be reserved for violent
offenders. But addicts often drive while they're high. They supervise their
children. Billing insurance or Medicaid for their drugs raises health-care
costs. Addicts consume law enforcement time when they pass forged
prescriptions or buy pills illegally.

"It gets hugely frustrating," Mellown says. "There's a limit to what I can
do, and when they don't get any penalties for what happens, it becomes a
systemic problem."

Law enforcement officials in Durham were so determined to strengthen the
penalties for abusers they worked with the State Bureau of Investigation to
see if they could impose federal drug trafficking charges in OxyContin
cases. The Sheriff's Office and the SBI figured how much OxyContin they
needed to find to impose trafficking charges, punishable by up to 20 years
in prison.

The time in jail earlier this year frightened Ferguson. She has three
children, ages 3, 7 and 10, and she's promising to clean up.

"My kids are more important to me than anyone in the world, and I don't
want to lose them," she says one spring afternoon. "They're worth changing
for."

Mellown isn't sure she'll do it.

"Nothing we can do to her," he says, "is worse than not having those pills."

In late June, Ferguson was arrested in Alamance County, west of Durham, on
charges of felony possession of cocaine and drug paraphernalia. She's
scheduled to go to court later this month. She's being held in the Alamance
County Jail on $10,000 bond.