Prescription Drug Addiction in America

RYAN DONNELLY HAD IT DOWN COLD. THREE years ago he was a 25-year-old Navy vet who had been booted from the service for a failed drug test, cycled through cocaine to alcohol, and finally landed on a 560-milligram-a-day oxycodone addiction. To maintain his habit, Donnelly stole prescription pads. When those ran out, he dipped legitimate scrips in nail polish remover to strip away the physicians' scribblings. He then took his forgeries to more than 20 pharmacies in and around his hometown of Toms River, New Jersey. (Want the latest and greatest medical advice and tips delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for our free Daily Dose newsletter!)

Today when the clean and sober Donnelly looks back on those years, he knows there were obvious signs of his addiction that anyone, especially an experienced pharmacist, could have picked up on.

"When you're withdrawing, your upper lip and your forehead sweat; you look like you have the flu," says Donnelly, who now runs FreeFromHell.com, a social support website for recovering addicts. He says sometimes he'd even put on a suit in an effort to look normal. "You try to pull it together, but you end up looking like a hoodlum."

If the red flags were there for all behind the counter to see, why didn't anyone turn Donnelly away—or better yet, turn him in? Fortunately, a family intervention finally pushed the pillhead to rehab before he could hurt himself or anyone else.

Things ended more tragically in the case of David Laffer. In June 2011, Laffer walked into a Long Island pharmacy and shot the pharmacist, a 17-year-old employee, and two customers while stealing hydrocodone, a semisynthetic opioid derived from codeine. In the 12 days before the killings, he had filled six prescriptions from five different doctors for a total of more than 400 pills, according to one Long Island newspaper.

"We sometimes lose sight of the fact that pharmacists are trained to spot drug-seeking behavior," says Luis Bauza, director of investigations at RxPatrol, an alliance formed between local law enforcement and the drug company Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, to track pharmacy fraud and thefts across the country. "I see pharmacists as our last line of defense."

OPIUM FROM AFGHANISTAN'S POPPY FIELDS helps fund the Taliban, but you could argue that it's the synthetic stuff that poses the most immediate threat to U.S. national security. In 2008 alone, 14,800 people died after taking opioid painkillers like oxycodone, according to the CDC. More recently, a 2010 survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that an estimated 1.9 million people had abused or been dependent on prescription painkillers in the past year. And increasingly, the addicts who don't kill themselves are becoming desperate enough to endanger others. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports that 686 armed pharmacy robberies took place in 2010, an 81 percent increase from just 4 years earlier. (Sure medicines are made for you to feel better, but some are no joke. Make sure you are aware of The 3 Meds with the Craziest Side Effects Ever.)

Pharmacist Mike Donohue has witnessed the change firsthand. In 2009, a man walked into Donohue's Seattle pharmacy and slipped the technician on duty a piece of paper that read, "Give me your OxyContin. I have a gun." Luckily for the people in the store that afternoon, Donohue noticed what was going on, pulled out his own gun, a Glock 19 loaded with hollow-point bullets, and chased the would-be robber out the door.

Donohue, 55, has been working behind a drugstore counter for more than two decades. He remembers a time not so long ago when a holster wasn't part of his uniform. In fact, in the late 1990s, medical boards across the nation were chiding doctors for often under-treating patients' pain and recommended the increased use of opioids for difficult-to-manage cases. According to Donohue, pharmacy boards encouraged reluctant pharmacists to dispense narcotics in such situations, in amounts that were significantly larger than what the pharmacists were used to doling out.

"They said people were suffering needlessly," he recalls. "We were told that with proper documentation and a legitimate prescription, dispensing these narcotics was appropriate. The word out then was 'Pharmacists are not police officers!'"

They're not physicians either, but if pharmacists don't intervene when suspicious customers proffer scrips, they expose themselves to as much liability as doctors do when they prescribe drugs inappropriately. Under the Controlled Substances Act, a clause commonly known as "corresponding responsibility" stipulates that a pharmacist who fills a prescription when there's reason to doubt its intent for legitimate medical use can lose his or her license and even be prosecuted for a felony.

New from MH!
Shred Your Abs and transform your body with Speed Shred, the cutting-edge fitness program from the experts at Men's Health.