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`< As Pain Pills Change, Abusers Move To New Drugs
`
`JULY 25, 2012 3:58 PM ET
`
`Copyright ©2012 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission
`required.
`
`ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
`
`From small towns to big cities, prescription painkiller abuse is getting worse. In the
`U.S., more people now die each year from pill overdoses than car accidents. And
`between 1999 and 2008, the number of deaths from drug poisoning tripled. Erica
`Peterson of member station WFPL visited one community that has been ravaged by
`overdoses of the latest popular pill.
`
`ERICA PETERSON, BYLINE: To the uninitiated, Austin, Indiana, doesn't look like a
`town under siege.
`
`Where am I going?
`
`JEREMY STEVENS: We'll go up here. Just keep going. We're going to go kind of to
`the edge of town. Keep going straight.
`
`PETERSON: That's Jeremy Stevens. He and Jeff Basham lead me on a tour of their
`former drug haunts. I'm driving because neither man wants his car to be recognized.
`
`STEVENS: Right here, all of these houses. I bought drugs at every house you're
`looking at here, too, every single one of them.
`
`PETERSON: In the maze of back roads off the city's main drag, the houses are close
`together. Some look run down, others are well-kept. But Stevens says many of these
`homes are inhabited by people who abuse and deal prescription painkillers.
`
`STEVENS: I've seen the mother and the father go to the doctor. You know, it's a big
`day. It's like a festival. Everybody is over at the house waiting on them to get back
`from the doctor and the pharmacy. They come in with their four or five different
`narcotics. Nothing wrong with them at all physically, and then those narcotics are
`gone within 30 minutes.
`
`PETERSON: Both Stevens and Basham have gone to jail for drug abuse. They're clean
`now, they say, but their community isn't. For the past year, the drug of choice has
`
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`been Opana, a prescription painkiller. It's gotten so bad that Indiana state trooper
`Jerry Goodin calls it an epidemic. But he says it's not limited to Indiana.
`
`JERRY GOODIN: This is a problem that is across the whole United States of America.
`And if you don't think that it's a problem in the little community or the little borough
`or the big city that you live in, then you're living with your head in the sand.
`
`PETERSON: Opana is legitimately prescribed to deal with chronic pain. The FDA
`approved the drug in 2006, but it wasn't until 2010 that Scott County began to see
`problems with Opana. That year, Purdue Pharma reformulated the popular and
`widely abused painkiller OxyContin. The new recipe made it harder to crush the drug
`and inject or snort it. When addicts couldn't abuse OxyContin anymore, they turned
`to Opana, which is much more potent. In Scott County, 31 people have died since last
`year because of Opana overdoses.
`
`KEVIN COLLINS: The majority of these deaths that we're seeing now are accidental
`deaths where people just don't know enough about the drug.
`
`PETERSON: Kevin Collins is the Scott County coroner, and he owns a funeral home.
`Over the past year, overdoses have doubled his case load.
`
`COLLINS: Matter of fact, so much so that as a funeral director, I had a young man
`that was killed in an automobile accident, and I suggested to the family that they put
`in the newspaper that he was killed in an automobile accident so people didn't
`assume that he died from a drug overdose.
`
`PETERSON: Some pill addicts buy the drugs on the street or steal them. But others
`have legitimate prescriptions, and some get hooked on the pills while using them to
`treat chronic pain. Scottsburg family practitioner Shane Avery says over the past
`decade, it seems medical philosophy has shifted.
`
`SHANE AVERY: I think that the issue at the heart of the matter is we've gotten people
`trained to look for answers to life's problems at the bottom of a pill bottle.
`
`PETERSON: Avery prescribes pain medication too. He requires random urine tests
`and pill counts to make sure patients are the ones taking the medication. He also uses
`a state database that lets doctors cross-reference patients to see if they're getting pills
`from other physicians. But these checks are optional.
`
`(SOUNDBITE OF A VEHICLE)
`
`PETERSON: This leaves Austin Police Chief Donald Spicer performing triage after
`many in his community have already become addicted to the pills.
`
`CHIEF DONALD SPICER: Hi, there. How is everybody? Everything quiet?
`
`PETERSON: Spicer is driving the streets of Austin looking for anything amiss. His
`small police force has ramped up street patrols to try to control the drug problem.
`Community groups, like the local CEASe partnership, hold monthly meetings to try to
`help.
`
`2
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`

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`UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Well, today is the official launch of CEASe's very first
`website.
`
`PETERSON: But perhaps the biggest tool in their fight came earlier this year. Opana
`manufacturer, Endo Pharmaceuticals, reformulated the drug. Today, it's difficult to
`find one of the original pills in Scott County pharmacies. The new pills are nearly
`impossible to crush, and thus, harder to abuse. Law enforcement is hopeful the
`reformulation will immediately reduce overdoses. But April Rovero with the National
`Coalition Against Prescription Drug Abuse says that won't solve addiction problems.
`
`APRIL ROVERO: It is just becoming a bigger and bigger problem. And despite our
`best work and that of a lot of other agencies and nonprofits and alliances and
`whatever out there, it just seems to continue.
`
`PETERSON: And as addicts moved from OxyContin to Opana, Indiana state trooper
`Jerry Goodin says now they'll look for a new drug. Already, the area has seen an
`increase in heroin use.
`
`JERRY GOODIN: We'll take our chances. We've been battling cocaine. We've been
`battling acid. We've been battling marijuana for years. We've done our best to do it.
`We've not completed the battle. Obviously, we still fight it. But it's a lot less of a
`problem than what these pain pills have caused us.
`
`PETERSON: As I leave Goodin's office, there's a worried-looking woman sitting
`outside. Later, Goodin calls me and says she was desperate for advice. The problem?
`One of her relatives is addicted to Opana. For NPR News, I'm Erica Peterson.
`
`Copyright © 2012 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media
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`
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`
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