Word: oxycontin
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...steep hills and rolling pastures dotted with sagging barns and country churches--into a society plagued by pilferers. They swipe guns from unlocked cabinets and push motorcycles out of garages in the dead of night. They swap or sell stolen watches, lawn mowers and sneakers for potent painkillers like OxyContin...
...radio impresario Rush Limbaugh in a scandal that sent him into rehab. Around the nation, the statistics tell the story. A Jan. 21, 2005, report from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that the number of people who had used oxycodone, the main ingredient in OxyContin, for nonmedical reasons jumped from 11.8 million in 2002 to 13.7 million in 2003. The increase happened even though OxyContin's maker stopped distributing its strongest pill, the 160-mg tablet, in 2001 and more states began prescription-monitoring programs to detect abusers who go from doctor to doctor looking...
Federal authorities are at a loss to explain why prescription-pill abuse pops up in some places and not in others, and why places like central Maine, eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia--where OxyContin abuse first emerged as a problem--are awash in drug-related crime. But Sheriff H.S. Caudill says a clue to how it all began in Tazewell lies in one of the original nicknames for OxyContin: coal miner's cocaine. Retired miners with back injuries were among the first in the area to use the powerful drug, and as word of its effectiveness spread, abusers began diverting...
...Blake St. resident reported that an unknown person entered his apartment and took $530 in cash and eight OxyContin and 12 morphine pills. There was no sign of forced entry...
Although high-profile cases of addiction to OxyContin and other opioid pain-killers have scared off many doctors and patients, such drugs have an important role to play in chronic pain. They are particularly useful, says Palmer, for elderly patients, many of whom can't tolerate the side effects of anti-inflammatories. Younger people develop tolerances to opiates more quickly than the elderly, says Palmer, which means the young wind up needing ever higher doses. That is not a big problem in older patients. "I like to use low-dose opioids in the elderly because there aren't any liver...