In large part, South Florida sees the pain pill epidemic from the supply end – the long lines at the pain clinics, the occasional raids with doctors hauled away in handcuffs., the political battles over whether and how to regulate so-called pill mills.
Shawn Clusky is at the other end of the oxy pipeline: Kentucky.
Clusky first tried OxyContin at age 17 with his school buddies, shortly after the high-powered narcotic painkiller went on the market. He went from occasional user and seller until about age 21, when he became fully addicted.
When he was 25, he got busted at a Lexington gas station for selling $15,000 worth of pills. Clusky received probation, but was still using until he was sent to the WestCare rehabilitation center in eastern Kentucky.
He now works there as a counselor. And is lucky to be alive.
“We’ve got more people dying of prescription drug overdoses than car accidents,’’ said U.S. Rep Hal Rogers.
Indeed, as far back as 2002, early in the epidemic, one fourth of all OxyContin-related deaths in the country took place in eastern Kentucky.
The problem is now so entrenched that the cheap flights and van rentals drug traffickers use to travel from Florida, with its lax laws on pill distribution, to Kentucky and other states to peddle “hillbilly heroin’’ are nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.’’
Some here in Kentucky harbor a deep resentment at Florida’s unwillingness to crack down on pill sales, for instance, at its refusal to set up a prescription database similar to those in other states to ensure that customers are not “doctor shopping’’ – scooping up some pills here, more pills there – by dealing with multiple physicians.
“Crook doctors operating these pill mills’’ in Florida are running rampant and are fueling the flow of illegally obtained prescription drugs to states such as Kentucky, Rogers, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told Attorney General Eric Holder during a recent hearing. “My people are dying.’’
MOVING TARGET
According to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, there was a fourfold increase nationally in treatment admissions for prescription pain pill abuse during the past decade. The increase spans every age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, employment level and region.
Nearly every family in eastern Kentucky has been touched by prescription-drug addiction and death.
In the late 1990s, it was easier to find OxyContin — pure oxycodone with a time release — in Kentucky. The pill’s maker, Purdue Pharma, was selling it “hand over fist’’ to doctors in eastern Kentucky, rich with coal mine injuries and government healthcare cards, Clusky said.
Clusky said a high school friend who worked at a pharmacy would steal the pills for his friends, so “It didn’t cost any of us anything.’’
When many of the eastern Kentucky pill sources dried up after law enforcement raids in 2001, Clusky said, the trade moved to Mexico, where oxycodone could be bought for pennies over the counter and sold for as much as $100 a pill in the rural United Stages Clusky began making trips to Nuevo Laredo, driving back home with thousands of pills. By this time, heroin was his drug of choice. He often traveled to larger cities, where heroin could be found more cheaply.
