Oxycontin Express, life in rural areas

We have experienced this firsthand as well. Pill bottles going missing after guests coming over have us doing all sorts of things. Switching meds into different bottles, hiding our medications in odd places. My wife has a bad back or as she calls it a "nurses back" after 17 years of being a CNA and lifting people, catching people when they fall etc... Before we had our homestead and we lived in FL she was able to get all the meds she could want. When we moved to rural Arkansas we could not even get into a pain management program. We finally found a doctor who was able/willing to help her out but watches closely and has made it known that the first time she thinks something funny she will quit giving scrips. It is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand I am happy that the docs out here are trying to curtail the abuse, but on the other we went through hell trying to get my wife the help she needs.

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around here WI our burglars skipped breaking in to houses for oxy and were holding up walgreens. we are more rural in our town so we have meth lab problems everywhere. folks growning weed, etc. when country folks are dying in gun battles we have got a problem, but sad to say that how some folks make ends meet.

It doesn't help that there are some Dr.s that believe that you can't become addicted to the pain meds if you are in pain, and that you only get addicted when you take them when you are not. I knew someone that was told that when she was dealing with her mother being addicted. She was in pain but the drugs had also altered her personality to the point of making her irrational and she went through withdrawl when they took her off of them. When I was looking up info on pain management I saw the same idea in several places.

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Give Blood it saves lives.

Breaking into pharmacies has become a big thing along with plain old holdups at pharmacies. I remember a poster on this board that was a pharmacist saying how he sat at home with a loaded gun worrying about being kidnapped or forced to provide narcotics.
In my small town shootings have gone on and there's always talk of gangs or gang wannabees. We even had an actual assassination at the Wal-Mart parking lot. Shooter used a rifle from a hill and shot at the person in WM parking lot. Unfortunately he was a good shot but not smart enough to know he was shooting the wrong person.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

The other attraction for drug thefts is that there is no "market" for the items that used to be worth stealing. Who wants to break in to steal someone's DVD player you can now buy new for $29 at Walmart? Stereo and video equipment used to be the big theft items when DVD players ran in the $100s of $$$; now, not so much. Plus, you don't need a pawn shop to fence stolen drugs.

Around here, we have helicopters doing fly-bys to check the woodlots for marijuana plots. And the occasional rural house is busted for suddenly using tons of electricity and discovered to be a grow-op. The crime rate is low, though, with vehicle thefts (mostly joy rides) being the ones that pop up in the paper. I can't recall a single murder in this area in the 10 years I've lived here.

Here in Alaska in my town Oxycontin is apparently all through the High School and has now supplanted Meth as a drug of choice (other than pot). Most of the docs that were giving scripts for it have been shut down but its now supposedly being smuggled in from down south. We just had a case where a kid was arrested for distro, bonded out on his parents secured mortgage bond, and was arrested within a week for selling again. The kid is 18 and facing something like 30 years.

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Just stopped in at the District Attorney's office in our town to visit. After the hellos the DA just started carrying on about how bad the drug problem is and pretty much stated everything that's in the film. He hadn't watched it yet but pretty much lives it every day. He said the Florida connection is where most of the pills are coming from. He said they're selling them here for $1 per milligram.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

Yeap, I'm all too familiar with the problem here in Washington State. As a member of the law enforcement community and a registered counselor (chemical dependency), I have seen prescription drug abuse/addiction sky rocket especially in this area. Oxycontin abuse is kind of misleading. It is actually oxycodone (a potent opiate) that is the main narcotic ingredient in Oxycontin. Oxycontin is just the brand name. People prefer Oxycontin as it contain 20, 60, 80 160 mgs of oxycodone and they can crush it up (this defeats the time released component of Oxycontin); thus getting the entire drug into the system (body). This drug is usually smoked, injected, snorted and taken orally. Oxycodone is a scheduled II narcotic (highly addictive and a highly abused). However you want to split the pill, its highly addictive factor increases emergency room trauma/deaths due to overdoses. Opiate related crimes are also on the rise. Many people "divert" prescriptions, steal, and re-sell the drug for profit or to feed their expensive addiction. On the street Oxycontin is very expensive, and many people I have interviewed resort to heroin as it is much cheaper. This drug was designed for people suffering from chronic sever pain. Its time released component helps patients as they need to ingest the substance less frequent. Unfortunately there are doctors out there that will prescribe opiates such as oxycodone (Oxycontin) for the right price. This drug is showing up in middle schools! Methamphetamine is still the number one scourge in this area; as it has sever environmental, family, social, economic, medical and long term cognitive and emotional consequences. Oxycontin is quickly catching up with its counter-part Meth. One major family issue is that genetics also factor into narcotic addiction/abuse. Alcohol addiction can be passed down genetically from generation to generation - many times skipping a generation. Interesting enough oxycodone and other similar type of narcotics are similar to the genetic element that occurs with alcohol. One main drug intervention to assist in treating alcoholism is also utilized for narcotic addiction/abuse. Opiates are one of the hardest drugs to "kick." As with alcohol people become violently ill. Eventually people continue to abuse alcohol and abuse opiates to stay "well." Anyway, I saw this thread last night as I was checking out tractors, and wanted to throw my hat into the ring. Hope I didn't bore anyone too much. Oh, did I say boredom is one component of addiction!

Informative post.

I guess the only thing is nobody seems to have an answer on what to do about it. Almost every person in local jails is in for a drug related offense, somehow tied to drugs. We've got so many in jail we can't build jails or hire jailers fast enough and we all know we can't afford it either. DA told me with budget cuts they're going to turn out about 4,000 who will go right back to doing what they did to get there in the first place.

How do you break the cycle? What is it that makes us as a society so dependent on drugs?

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

I don't know what the going price of a tablet is, but I've heard $100. If so, a 60 pill bottle would be worth $6,000 on the street. Extremely high mark up.

Supply and demand at work.

i believe there is a deep sense of anomy (or unconnectedness) in our culture. Communities are broken, families are scattered. humans were not built to live the way we do. i think people just numb themselves any way they can out of boredom. (drugs, booze, food, etc.)

or it's a government plot to make everyone sit down and shut up.:-)

Other than the crime aspect:

Saw a good post on my doctor's forum about the disability/pain cycle. The doc points out that some people expect to be PAIN FREE, and some docs try to oblige them. This can lead to addiction and overuse. These folks are, well, kind of wimpy. But they may not know any better or truly have hyper pain sensation. When I was a kid at the dental school getting work done my student dentist usually gave me repeated shots because I complained of still feeling [pain]. One day he appealed to his teacher since I had seemed to need way more than was right. That mean old dental prof said "There's supposed to be SOME pain" and told him to go ahead and drill.

I was taught long ago that addictive pain drugs are only for folks DYING to relieve their last days/months, or for folks who definitely only need pain relief short term like had surgery but will be healed and pain free soon. That said plenty of folks get addicted when they try opiates for a surgery- there's some issues possibly with addictive genetics and also with control over pain- a patient controlled pump tops begging the nurse for a fix and having to suffer pain before every dose (instead of never really suffering), which are thought to worsen addiction psychologically.

Now they teach that opiates are good for even chronic pain even for 20 year olds. That has led to this sort of issue: Obesity causing arthritis causing pain causing even less movement/exercise causing worse obesity in a downward spiral, and other pain syndromes where exercise helps but the patient avoids exercise because of slight pain or discomfort with exercise and thereby also spirals downward.

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US Army veteran, military retiree spouse, and military; civilian; British NHS; and VA doctor.

wow, I must be living in never never land. I never heard of this type of drug abuse. all my teenage nieces and nephews still just do pot

this has codeine in it? the one time I tried taking a pain killer ending in codone it made me so nauseous it was like sea sickness. have refused any scripts for it since. and I only took half a pill.

What bothers me is that people see this and assume that anyone who takes prescription painkillers has a drug problem. While I do agree that this is a real problem (I've had family members suffer from severe drug addictions) I hate the fact that my choices are to be throwing up from pain or having people stare when I have to go hunting for my pain pills. I have a back injury and no health insurance, so although I was told the state program would cover my surgery six months ago I still haven't gotten anyone to return my phone calls. With suspected ruptured discs I was told no exercise and no lifting over 25#. I finally had to start working and working out again because I was getting so stiff and the animals still expect to be fed. There are days that I HAVE to take the hydrocodone to be functional at all. OTOH, the doctor who prescribed them wrote it for 60 with three refills, and three months later I still haven't used half of the first bottle. But there are many days that I refuse to take them because I need to prove to myself that I will be ok without them. Long story short, I've had people ask to buy them off me, whisper about me, had pills go missing from my purse, etc. I would be perfectly happy to have them out of my life completely, but when they're what keeps me from laying on the floor crying and throwing up from pain (and I have a pretty high tolerance) then yes I will keep taking them.

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www.ladiesfarmjournal.blogspot.com

This is why I wanted to post this. Many have no idea this is going on or how widespread it is. As the narcotics officers in my county said, they wish all they had to deal with was pot smokers.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

I too, have heard that Oxy is the drug of choice, and is an extremely widespread problem.

My questions are: Why are so many doctors happy to prescribe this, and why isn't there a Federal crack down on the makers of Oxy?

Is there just one maker of Oxycontin, or is it available in generic form too? If there is just one maker of Oxy, it would be easy to crack down on the sale. It would be expensive to track, but it would be possible. If available in generic form, it is probably being made and distributed by foreign companies around the world, just like cold remedy pills are. (Anyone see that documentary on that?)

I guess what I am getting at is this: The drug makers are getting rich selling this trash, probably in the name of "corporate profits for Wall Street". If this is the case, it wouldn't surprise me a bit.

The more I hear about meth and Oxy, as well as dope of all makes, is there going to be a day that the non-abusers are a small minority?

DH is a LEO, and from what I have heard, I think they already are a small minority.

LOL. When I visited relatives in Croatia I noticed smoking seemed to be a national pastime. As a non-smoker a couple of people asked me why I didn't smoke.

I had a courtsey visit with the village priest. He was smoking and I mentioned in the U.S. they were known as coffin nails. He laughed and said they were called the same thing there.

As near as I could tell they were $1 pack (8 kuna). The average month gross income was about $200 USD per month, so it wasn't an inexpensive habit when compared to income.

The same was true in the U.S. before the states saw them as a revenue source and raised the taxes under the pretense of doing so "to discourage smoking by raising the cost of cigarettes". I wonder what they (the states) would do if smokers would quit smoking "en masse".

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Diamondtim

You can tell what someone thinks by reading the bumper stickers on their car. You can also tell if they think at all.

Enjoy beers and enjoy smoking some greens. I'm more fearful of prescription drugs. I won't take ANY PERIOD. I don't know of any one in our rural area who really does more then this more then just experiementing.

I did have a friend get hooked on a prescription drug while away b/c of back problems. Bad stuff and it's legal,go figure . Companys are legitly making tons on money...something wrong with this picture. I don't know the answer but people must be out of balance. The more I read about food I suspect alot of the issues in the us we are having is from poison processed foods. They manafest them selfs into lots of different diseases.

Drugs will never go away . The best thing is to keep people educated. It's sick that you go into a doctors office and see all these drugs (not even sure what they do) all over their pens / papers / magazines) at least you know who owns the medical fields. sad.