Pubdate: Mon, 22 Mar 2004
Source: Roanoke Times (VA)
Copyright: 2004 Roanoke Times
Contact:  http://www.roanoke.com/roatimes/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/368

PRESCRIPTION ADDICTIONS

Even as national awareness grows of widespread prescription drug abuse, 
Virginia lawmakers want to impede an avenue of treatment.

Among other mischief, Virginia's General Assembly busied itself at this 
year's inglorious session with putting up legal roadblocks against drug 
treatment centers.

So Virginians will find their options that much more limited should they 
discover they must contend with news more dire than that a methadone clinic 
plans to open nearby.

The more dire news is that prescription medicines, such as the highly 
addictive narcotics OxyContin and Vicodin, now rank as the second-most 
abused drugs in the nation, right behind marijuana.

Oh, and a University of Michigan study shows that, nationwide, prescription 
drug abuse increased from the 2002 to 2003 school year among eighth-, 10th- 
and 12th-graders.

Those youngsters are not getting their drugs at methadone clinics. But they 
might need methadone clinics to get free of addiction if their youthful 
experimentation runs to OxyContin or other opioids found in the medicine 
cabinet at home.

Prescription drug abuse ruins lives, destroys families and generates the 
kind of crime that middle-class householders tend to associate only with 
street drugs.

How serious is the problem? Serious enough, The New York Times reports, that:

n Congress is considering a bill to ban Internet prescription drug sales 
without a visit to a doctor and a prescription.

n The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is seeking 
strategies for combating the illegal marketing and abuse of prescription drugs.

n President Bush wants a 4.6 percent increase in the federal budget for 
anti-drug programs next year, nine times the average increase for programs 
unrelated to defense or national security.

n People are selling their homes to support their habits, according to a 
social services director in eastern Kentucky.

Devastating. But that is not news to Virginia lawmakers. Two years ago, 
they authorized a pilot program to let police track controlled-drug 
prescriptions, and crack down on "doctor shopping," in far Southwest, where 
addiction was - and is - rampant.

Sen. William Wampler, R-Bristol, sponsored that bill. This year - driven, 
surely, by the same constituent fears - he sponsored the one that bars 
methadone clinics within one-half mile of day care centers or elementary or 
secondary schools.

Treatment clinics are not the problem, though. They are part of the solution.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman