" Many patients addicted to the drug often go ?doctor-shopping?. This is the term coined to describe the phenomenon of patients going to different doctors and obtaining prescriptions for the drug. They also go to different pharmacies in different areas to get those prescriptions filled so that they buy the drug unnoticed. To sustain their habits, OxyContin abusers sometimes engage in committing fraud and theft (US DHHS 2001), and abusers will commit forgery and alter prescriptions. Burglaries and robberies in pharmacies have been reported. Abusers use the drug in unintended ways by crushing the tablets, dissolving and injecting, or snorting the powder. In the process of getting a quick heroin-like high, people put themselves at risk of overdose-related death. There have also been case reports of adolescents stealing OxyContin from their parents (Katz and Hays 2004)."
Although there has not been any mention about specific data, doctor shopping remains one of the popular ways of illicitly obtaining the prescription drug for abuse (DEA 2002). Robberies, burglaries, and thefts are some of the other methods of obtaining OxyContin illegally.
News about OxyContin abuse first surfaced in rural areas of Maine during the late 1990s and then spread down the east coast to include West Virginia, Kentucky, Southern Ohio. The most hard hit areas were that of the rural Appalachia and Ohio valley (Inciardi and Goode 2003). Data suggest that Kentucky was one of the leading states for OxyContin-related crimes, mostly break-ins (Inciardi and Goode 2003). There was a tremendous increase in the number of patients admitted for treatment of narcotic-related abuse, and the majority of them were being treated for OxyContin. Many reports of OxyContin abuse appeared in the local newspapers and television channels; however, media outlets also reported that the OxyContin abuse problem was not restricted to the rural Appalachia but was spreading across the entire United States."
Well, that's all we need here in the DR...a new generation of people highly addicted to Oxycontin, Vicadon, etc. and the crime wave that would quickly follow it.
No Thanks.
Frank