QUIET S.C. TOWN WAS A HOT SPOT FOR OXYCONTIN

LANCASTER - No one knows exactly when OxyContin came to Lancaster County or
why abuse of the drug so quickly struck this quiet community on South
Carolina's northern border. But law enforcement and addiction experts say
dozens of people in neighborhoods across Lancaster took part in the
OxyContin drug trade beginning in early 2000.

Gerald Ghent had a wife, two young children and a job for 12 years in a
local plant when he was indicted last year on federal drug possession charges.

Police say he had been traveling to a Myrtle Beach pain clinic, receiving
thousands of OxyContin pills and other narcotics, and reselling them in
Lancaster. He was sentenced in January to three years in federal prison.

"I was blinded by the whole thing," says his mother, Vivian. "I thought as
long as he was going to work and he had a pretty normal home life, he was OK."

Lancaster, hometown of Gov. Jim Hodges, is a textile community south of
Charlotte, N.C., with about 61,000 residents. Many mill jobs are gone,
replaced by work at a battery factory and at national retailers like Kmart
and Wal-Mart.

Lancaster is filled with families who stay for generations. Funerals draw
hundreds; high school football teams are backed by fans who travel to every
out-of-town game.

The community didn't even have a full-time narcotics officer until 1991. In
2000, worried about the spread in OxyContin abuse, local law enforcement
joined forces with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Investigators say they learned the source of much of Lancaster's illicit
OxyContin was a pain clinic some three hours away in Myrtle Beach. That's
where Ghent and at least 50 others were going, police say, at least monthly
and sometimes more.

One was 63-year-old tax accountant Curtis Cooper.

Cooper was sentenced in February to 57 months in federal prison for
conspiring to distribute OxyContin and other drugs. Police say he'd sell
them right out of his tax office and sometimes allowed clients to trade
their tax refunds for drugs.

"He was probably making more money out of the pill business than the tax
business," says Lt. Bill Murphy, with the Lancaster County Sheriff's Office.

Cooper and his attorney would not comment.

His house and tax office sit in a suburb decorated with bird feeders and
wind chimes. It's a world away from what Lancaster residents call Mill
Hill, a neighborhood of condemned houses and boarded-up stores butting up
against Springs Industries. That's where police say Marion Blackwell sold
OxyContin.

An unemployed mill worker, Blackwell tried to make a living scavenging for
cans and selling the aluminum for 30 cents a pound. He lived in an
abandoned barber shop without electricity or plumbing.

Eventually, police say, he started paying Medicaid patients $9 for their
OxyContin pills. Blackwell would resell them for $40 each - pocketing $31
profit per pill. He pleaded guilty to drug charges.

"You've got to make a living, I guess," says Blackwell, now living in a
nearby town.

Police say OxyContin in Lancaster spread from friend to friend, neighbor to
neighbor, pool halls to parties. It even hit law enforcement circles. In
August 2000, former narcotics officer Barry Todd Sullivan tried to trade
cocaine for OxyContin from an undercover officer. He pleaded guilty and was
sentenced to 33 months in federal prison.

Marianne Taylor tried OxyContin at a party. She was 20 and had a young boy
to raise. Taylor got sick and eventually refused to try OxyContin again but
says some of her friends continued to abuse the drug.

"When OxyContin came out, it came out big in Lancaster," Taylor says.

"There's not a lot to do here for teenagers. People go to parties where
someone comes in and tells them there's something new to try. It gets
bigger and bigger."

At the Lancaster Recovery Center, OxyContin quickly became the most
pressing concern among staff.

In recent months, counselors say they've seen more and more people who
started taking OxyContin for chronic pain. They came to the Recovery Center
to wean themselves off of the drug.

"OxyContin was replacing cocaine and everything else that we were seeing,"
says Mary Norris, assistant director at the Recovery Center at Springs
Memorial Hospital. "It was like gold [to abusers]."