A PAINKILLER'S DOUBLE LIFE AS AN ILLEGAL STREET DRUG

TV Review -- '48 Hours: Addicted'

In a scene of creepy voyeurism and joltingly effective reporting, a
22-year-old named Troy Swett, who looks like any middle-class college
student in a red sweatshirt and baseball cap, sits in his messy apartment
in Maine and prepares to stick a needle in his arm as the cameras watch.
"I'm ashamed of it," he tells Harold Dow, the CBS reporter sitting next to
him as he crushes a pill, cooks it up in a spoon and ties off his arm.

Later, as Mr. Swett travels to California for a rapid detox treatment that
promises to cure him in hours after four years of addiction, CBS gives him
a video camera so he can tape himself preparing his syringe in an airport
bathroom.

His is by far the most compelling story in tonight's "48 Hours: Addicted,"
about OxyContin, a prescription painkiller that contains a synthetic opium
and that has become a sometimes lethal street drug. The program is
revealing about the drug's abuse and also about the voyeuristic element of
journalism.

An even more viscerally unsettling companion report about the epidemic of
OxyContin abuse is on MTV's "True Life" series tomorrow, in a program far
better than its lurid title, "I'm Hooked on OxyContin."

The linked reports are the result of corporate synergy — both CBS and MTV
are part of Viacom — and both follow Mr. Swett's story while offering
different examples of others who use OxyContin, legally and effectively for
pain and illegally as a recreational drug. When it is not focused on Mr.
Swett, "48 Hours" uses a familiar formula of network newsmagazines while
MTV offers a more intimate, jarring view. But these stylistic differences
pale next to the gripping personal stories about how quickly OxyContin, a
pill that came on the market in 1996 has ruined so many lives.

The Troy Swett story is dramatic because "48 Hours" follows it as it
happens. We see how easily the drug is abused, because its time-release
coating is destroyed when the pill is ground up. Someone who chews or
shoots it gets all the drug at once, creating a high similar to that of heroin.

Mr. Swett's mother pays $9,800 for his detox treatment, and also pays for
the OxyContin that the treatment center has told him to keep using in the
10 days before he goes to California, to prevent withdrawal before arrives.
We observe him in a hospital bed, sedated so he will not be aware of what
we see: his body twitches as it goes through withdrawal.

His story is stretched out over the program's hour, with other examples
interspersed. Those cases offer essential information, but have the flat
quality of news features churned out by rote. One woman is pleased with the
way OxyContin manages her pain, but there has been such a rash of robberies
at pharmacies dispensing it that she is afraid of being mugged in the
parking lot. Another woman says she took the drug as prescribed after
surgery and became addicted. And a representative of the drug's
manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, says OxyContin is not addictive when used
properly. The company is working on a way to make the time-release element
tougher to destroy, but that is several years away.

The program is hard on the drug company, but remarkably easy on the detox
center. Mr. Swett's doctor is asked, but not pressed, about the risks of
treating addiction as a physical problem, with only limited psychological
help. The MTV program adds to that issue, reporting that 32 percent of
rapid detox patients return to drugs within a year.

"I'm Hooked on OxyContin" also takes a closer look at young people who
abuse the drug and why: it loosens them up at parties, it seems easy to
control. In fact, it can be lethal when combined with alcohol or other
drugs and is thought to have caused at least 280 deaths in the last two
years. In the working-class neighborhood of Fishtown, in Philadelphia, a
group of friends kept using OxyContin even after Lauren, 18, died after
using it. A month later Eddie, also 18, died the same way. As Lauren and
Eddie's friends and family remember what happened, the program's close-up
camera work and quick-cut editing eliminate the sterile reportorial
distance of more traditional programs.

Both programs return to Mr. Swett two months after his treatment. He is
still clean, but does not have much of a life. He lives with his mother,
works as a laborer, avoids his old drug-using friends. We are left with the
insoluble question of how much the camera's presence affects its subjects'
behavior and the thorny issue of how reporters, subjects and viewers become
complicit in shattering that subject's privacy. Mr. Swett has made a
valuable drama possible by letting cameras enter his life, even as those
cameras make intruders of us all.

48 HOURS Addicted

CBS, tonight at 10 p.m. Susan Zirinsky, executive producer; Peter
Schweitzer, senior producer; Anthony Batson, Miguel Sancho, Mary Sue
Holland-Dehn and Chuck Stevenson, producers; Harold Dow, Peter Van Sant and
Serena Altschul, correspondents; Dan Rather, anchor. A presentation of CBS
News.

TRUE LIFE I'm Hooked on OxyContin

MTV, Thursday at 10 p.m. Dave Sirulnick and Lauren Lazin, executive
producers; Marshall Eisen, supervising producer; Gini Sikes, producer;
Anneka Jones, co-producer; Elizabeth Hadley and Jennifer Platt, associate
producers; Serena Altschul, narrator. A presentation of MTV News and Docs.