Word: pill
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...taken seven years for the full measure of the pill's stranglehold on Appalachian counties like Tazewell to become obvious--in clogged and crowded courts, in villages whose jails are so full that inmates sleep on the floor, and in neighborhoods focused on leaving nothing valuable lying around. The number of robberies, burglaries and thefts has shot up 48% in Tazewell in only five years, from 483 crimes in 1998 to 716 in 2003, even as the national property-crime rate fell 25%. "People are stealing anything that's not nailed down," says county commonwealth's attorney Dennis Lee. Testimony...
...winner--residents like to point up their law-and-order quietness with the story of how they once put a cow in jail because they could not tolerate the clanging bell. Now the county's crime woes have made it a case study in how prescription-pill abuse has stressed a judicial system to the breaking point, overwhelming cops, sheriffs, prosecutors and judges...
...bogged down with drug-related crime that it dropped out of a four-county drug task force in order to concentrate on its own problems. In Lee, which has the same jail-crowding problem as Buchanan, local authorities have called on federal prosecutors to help take prescription-pill abusers off the street. The feds can use their power to charge abusers with crimes that carry more stringent penalties. In this rural Appalachian region, which is underserved by doctors, seven physicians have been convicted of overprescribing painkillers over the past five years...
State and local officials are building institutions virtually overnight to grapple with pill-related crime. Three regional jails are set to open this spring to ease inmate overcrowding in the state's Appalachian corner, and the Virginia general assembly recently appointed another circuit judge to help Tazewell. Also, the legislature has begun exploring an expansion of southwestern Virginia's prescription-monitoring program statewide, allowing state police and physicians to detect patients who go doctor shopping. In Tazewell, authorities are applying a big-city solution to their rural problem. They recently began a drug court dedicated to drug cases, where young...