Pubdate: Sun, 30 May 2004 Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA) Copyright: 2004 Richmond Newspapers Inc. Contact: http://www.timesdispatch.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/365 Author: Rex Bowman, Times-Dispatch Staff Writer Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/oxycontin.htm (Oxycontin/Oxycodone) DRUG SCOURGE WORSENS Appalachian Virginia's Soaring Crimes Rates Linked To Growing Number Of Oxycontin Addicts TAZEWELL - They shoplift underwear. They swipe their grandmothers' wedding rings, empty their neighbors' gun cabinets and rip the chrome wheels off strangers' cars. Drug junkies have turned a wide swath of Appalachia into a den of thieves, selling stolen goods to feed their addictions and driving up the crime rate in Virginia's mountain communities even as the state is enjoying a decade-long drop in crime. Five years after sheriffs and prosecutors first noticed that abusers of OxyContin and other prescription drugs were creating an epidemic of lawless behavior, data compiled by state and federal law-enforcement officials show the situation has worsened. Bucking a statewide trend, robbery, burglary and larceny are on the rise in large parts of Appalachian Virginia. Increasingly, in counties such as Buchanan, Tazewell and Lee - the three counties where the illegal use of OxyContin first surfaced - residents are waking to find their televisions are missing, their lawn chairs are gone, their guitars, wristwatches and sneakers have disappeared. "They'll grab anything that they can market," said Buchanan Chief Deputy Randal Ashby, "TVs, VCRs, money out of houses, jewelry, lawnmowers, Weed-eaters - anything they can pick up and run with." "They'll steal lawnmowers, four-wheelers, guns, jewelry, whatever they can get their hands on," said Maj. Jimmy Woodard of the Lee Sheriff's Department. "They'll steal checkbooks and write checks to pay for their drug habit." The increase in crime is creating crowded jails, taxing the abilities of sheriffs' departments and prosecutors' offices, and threatening to overwhelm the area's courts. The five-year trend is also a disturbing development because, traditionally, Appalachian Virginia's low crime rate has been a source of pride. Noted for its high unemployment, pockets of poverty and poor health care, the area could at least boast of being partially immune from the crime that bedevils big cities. But those bragging rights are now in jeopardy. In hardscrabble Buchanan (pop. 24,795), the crime rate has jumped from 1,483 crimes per 100,000 residents in 1998 to 3,731 in 2002, the last year for which the Virginia State Police statistics are available. The number of burglaries has jumped from 113 in 1998 to 213 in 2002; the number of larcenies (anything from pick-pocketing to shoplifting to stealing a bicycle from the curb) jumped from 225 to 343. In rural Lee (pop. 21,445), the crime rate soared from 1,438 crimes per 100,000 residents in 1998 to 4,049 in 2002. Larcenies jumped from 161 in 1998 to 281 in 2002, while burglaries increased from 111 to 182. And in Tazewell (pop. 28,346), the crime rate increased from 2,834 crimes per 100,000 residents in 1998 to 4,819 crimes in 2002, fueled by a rise in the number of thefts: from 155 burglaries in 1998 to 204 in 2002, and from 323 larcenies to 454. The crime rate also rose in neighboring counties in the five years, nearly doubling in Scott, more than doubling in Russell and Wise, and more than tripling in Dickenson. The dramatic increase in crime comes even as five of the seven counties saw their populations shrink. By contrast, the state's population swelled from 6.79 million in 1998 to 7.29 million in 2002, yet the number of major crimes (murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary and larceny) dropped from 248,576 to 229,039 in 2002. During that time, the state's crime rate dropped from 3,660 crimes per 100,000 residents to 3,140. Officials universally point to one major cause for the dramatic difference between the state's declining crime rate and the rising rates in the Appalachia counties: OxyContin. "You can describe it as Prohibition time in Southwest Virginia with the drug problem, and OxyContin is the drug of choice," said Ashby, of Buchanan. "Seventy-five to 85 percent of the felony cases in Tazewell involve drugs, thefts or crimes to get drugs, and Oxy is still the most popular drug," said Dennis Lee, Tazewell County's prosecutor. OxyContin, also known as Oxy and O.C., is a powerful painkiller intended to ease the suffering of those in moderate to acute pain. An opiate, like morphine and heroin, it provides relief for up to 12 hours, and thousands of patients nationwide call it a miracle drug that gave them back their lives. The federal government approved its sale in 1996, and by the following year abusers in far Southwest Virginia had discovered that they could achieve a heroinlike high by crushing the tablets, then chewing, snorting or injecting the powder. The drug, which contains oxycodone, is highly addictive. Woodard said he has seen cases where junkies have had their teeth pulled in order to get a dentist to prescribe OxyContin. "Other people have broken their bones to get Oxy," Woodard said. "You think you've seen everything, but you haven't." Initially, OxyContin sold illegally for $1 per milligram, meaning a single 80 mg pill cost an addict $80. But the crackdown on the illicit prescription drug trade - seven Southwest Virginia doctors have been convicted - has forced the price up to $1.50 per milligram. Since some abusers take up to four 80 mg tablets at a time, they need $480 to feed their habit, a cost that prompts them to hold up convenience stores, steal from their friends and rob their families. "I've had to put bars on the windows and doors," said the owner of one grocery store in Pounding Mills, in Tazewell, who spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. "The store's been robbed twice in the last year. Two guys are in jail, and I was in court during the preliminary hearing when they admitted they needed the money for OxyContin. I've got another store in this general area, and it was robbed by two kids with a knife. They took the money and walked a quarter of a mile to a dealer's house and spent it on drugs - OxyContin." Tazewell is at ground zero of the crime surge, said Sheriff H.F. Caudill. He noted that Tazewell accounts for 61.3 percent of all Circuit Court cases in the four-county judicial district composed of Tazewell, Russell, Buchanan and Dickenson counties. A grand jury that met May 18 handed down 182 indictments, he added, a record. And the county jail, he said, now houses 218 inmates, though it was built to accommodate fewer than 90. "I'd say 85 percent of them are in there for selling drugs or doing something to get'em," said 30-year-old inmate Ray Nesbitt, serving time for assaulting an officer. Nesbitt said he volunteers to pick up trash on the county's roads to spend time away from the crowded jail. Tazewell sends another 20 to 30 prisoners to jails outside the area, Caudill said. Caudill's office is on the town of Tazewell's Main Street, which bisects an old-fashioned downtown with a few banks, a library, a church, a furniture and appliance store, a barbershop, a courthouse and, handling the burgeoning criminal case load, the offices of no fewer than 27 lawyers. "Our number of lawyers in the last five or six years, I won't say it's mushroomed, but it has grown significantly," said longtime Main Street lawyer Stephen Arey. "There's enough work to keep everybody busy." Indeed, Caudill said the number of inmates means his department is understaffed by 32 deputies, as computed according to state standards. Lee, the prosecutor, noted that the number of people on probation in Tazewell is approaching 1,000, a significant number in such a rural county. In neighboring Buchanan, Chief Deputy Ashby said the jail is currently housing nearly double its capacity of 34 inmates, and the county has to spend up to $8,000 each month to ship other inmates to jails in Dublin and as far away as Roanoke. The sheriff's department is also stretched thin, he said. Buchanan once belonged to a four-county task force created specifically to tackle the area's drug crimes, but had to pull out to focus on the growing trade and related crime inside Buchanan. "There's just so much of a drug problem here that it's too much to take on somebody else's drug problem." In Lee, 82 inmates currently reside in a jail built to hold 32, said Woodard, estimating that up to 95 percent of all felony crime in Lee is connected to drugs. In Lee, he said, guns are the favorite target of drug addicts looking for something to steal. In a strategy aimed at exploiting that propensity, Lee asked agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for help. Because it is a federal crime to sell guns for drugs, prosecutors have sent 130 people to federal penitentiaries in the past three years, Woodard said. And more help is on the way. A regional jail is scheduled to open in Scott next spring, alleviating the crowding in Lee and elsewhere. The state is also working to ease the problems brought on by the surge in crime, separating Buchanan and Tazewell from the other counties and putting the two in a single probation district, thereby easing the workload of probation officers. The state has also approved a fourth circuit judge for the four-county judicial circuit. That judge is to begin hearing cases next year. The moves come even as the counties brace for the arrival of a new, generic form of OxyContin. The generic version is not yet in most pharmacies but has already appeared on the black market in eastern Kentucky. "It'll work its way here, " said Ashby, of Buchanan, adding that he sees no end to the crime wave. "They get hooked on these drugs, and they have to steal to pay for them." - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D