Pubdate: Sun, 15 Feb 2004
Source: Evansville Courier & Press (IN)
Copyright: 2004 The Evansville Courier
Contact:  http://www.courierpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/138
Author: Maureen Hayden, Courier & Press staff writer

OXYCONTIN AND ABUSE ARE DEADLY MIXTURE

Melissa Anne Herman was far from home when she died in the emergency
room of Deaconess Hospital.

The 35-year-old wife and mother left her home in Edinburgh, Ind., days
before her death to visit her ex-husband, a convicted drug dealer who
claimed he'd found Jesus and was on the road to redemption.

She even packed her own Bible.

But on the night of Feb. 17, 2003, Herman's former husband, Robert L.
Hertzberger, offered her something other than prayer, police say. In
the bathroom of an apartment on Evansville's North Side, Hertzberger
injected Herman, and then himself, with a potent prescription
painkiller called OxyContin, according to investigators.

The opiate-based drug, having been crushed, cooked and stripped of its
time-release additive, was supposed to give them an intense heroinlike
rush. Instead, it shut down Herman's respiratory system. Sixteen
minutes after she arrived in the emergency room, she was dead.

It's a scary tale, but not an isolated one. Herman's death was one of
12 OxyContin-related deaths investigated last year by the Vanderburgh
County coroner's office. It's a small but alarming number, considering
the office had seen only a handful of OxyContin-related deaths before
2003.

"We've got a problem and it's only going to get worse," said Annie
Groves, the Vanderburgh County chief deputy coroner. "People are dying
from abuse of OxyContin and other prescription painkillers, but nobody
knows it." Herman's death may begin to change that. Federal
prosecutors have charged Hertzberger with a felony drug charge that no
one in central or Southern Indiana has ever been convicted of,
according to U.S. Attorney Susan Brooks. The 41-year-old Evansville
man has been charged under a statute known as the "Len Bias law,"
named for the University of Maryland star college basketball player
who overdosed on cocaine in 1986, two days after he was drafted by the
Boston Celtics. The 1987 law expanded federal drug penalties for
anyone convicted of distributing drugs that lead to someone's death.

If convicted, Hertzberger could spend the rest of his life in
prison.

Brooks says she welcomes the attention the case may get. "Unless we do
a lot more education about the problem, we're going to see a lot more
deaths," she said. Drug-enforcement officials say the abuse of
OxyContin and other brand-name prescription painkillers such as Lortab
and Fenitol is rising rapidly in Indiana. Groves said toxicology
reports on the 29 fatal drug overdoses investigated by her office last
year show a "cocktail of prescription drugs." Hydrocodone, the active
ingredient in the prescription drug Lortab, is one of the most
prevalent. But drug enforcement officials have been most concerned
about OxyContin, a drug with more than $1 billion in annual sales,
that was introduced in 1996 and promoted heavily as a potent, but
nonaddictive, painkiller. By 2001, the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration was calling it the most abused prescription drug on the
market.

OxyContin may seem like an unlikely candidate for abuse at first
glance. It's a slow-release, long-lasting painkiller, prescribed for
people suffering from intense back pain, arthritis or complications
from cancer. It works well because the active ingredient, oxycodone,
is highly concentrated but controlled with a time-release agent.
That's why the drug's maker, Purdue Pharma LLC, promoted the narcotic
as a kind of miracle painkiller; it said only 1 percent of its users
would be at risk for addiction, according to a General Accounting
Office report released in January. The General Accounting Office
faulted the drug maker for not acknowledging what veteran drug abusers
quickly discovered: They could easily defeat the time-release
mechanism by crushing the tablet to get a heroinlike high by
swallowing, snorting or injecting the drug. That secret spread quickly
in places like eastern Kentucky, where law enforcement officials saw
an epidemic of OxyContin abuse and a tidal wave of accompanying crime.
They labeled the drug "hillbilly heroin." But the label is misleading,
says Brooks and other law enforcement officials. Unlike heroin,
OxyContin and other prescription painkillers are legal, easy to get
legitimately, and they don't carry the same social stigma as street
drugs do. That's why Hertzberger, who has a long record of
drug-related crimes, allegedly was able to get a prescription for
OxyContin the same way radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and
Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay apparently did, at least initially:
by walking into a doctor's office and complaining of chronic pain.
"Unlike crack cocaine and some of the other street drugs, there's no
profile of a prescription-drug abuser," said Brooks. "It's a
stay-at-home mom, a radio talk show host, or a kid stealing the drugs
from his parent's medicine cabinet. Anybody can get hooked." Last
February, less than two weeks after Herman's death, Brooks' office
scored a small but significant victory in the war against OxyContin
abuse.

An Indianapolis doctor prosecuted by her office was sentenced to 51
months in a federal prison for illegally prescribing hundreds of doses
of OxyContin to a woman who turned around and sold the narcotic
painkiller on the street. Investigators discovered that the physician,
Dr. Randolph W. Lievertz, wrote more than $1 million worth of
OxyContin prescriptions in two years to Medicaid patients. Colleagues
said that before his arrest, Lievertz was a paid spokesman for the
drug maker. The federal investigation of Lievertz started, Brooks
said, after the death of a North Vernon, Ind., teenager who died after
taking OxyContin at a party. Investigators traced the prescription
written by Lievertz.

"That case put OxyContin on my radar screen," Brooks said. The
Lievertz investigation made The New York Times, and it convinced
Brooks that prescription drug abuse was as dangerous as the crack
cocaine and the methamphetamine labs that were consuming the energies
of drug investigators throughout Southern Indiana. "We see
prescription drugs as something safer than street drugs," said Brooks.
"I don't think most people know how easy it is to abuse them."

Prescription drug abuse spawns its own special kind of crime,
according to the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators.
The president of the group's Indiana chapter is Bob Bloss, a Newburgh
pharmacist who works as a drug enforcement investigator for the
Indiana Board of Pharmacy.

Bloss said one way the National Association of Drug Diversion
Investigators tracks prescription drug abuse in a community is by the
number of burglaries and robberies of pharmacies. "You've got
pharmacists afraid to stock some prescription painkillers," said
Bloss. "They don't want some addict pointing a gun at their head."
Last month, two Evansville pharmacies were robbed of prescription
painkillers by a man wielding a box cutter and demanding OxyContin.
Rodney Freeman Wilson, 49, was caught and arrested, and later hanged
himself in the Vanderburgh County Jail. Before his death, he told
police he was addicted to the drug.

In late January, an Evansville man was arrested and accused of
swapping stolen guns for OxyContin belonging to a cancer patient.
Tracy A. Fussner, 31, was indicted Jan. 28 by a federal grand jury on
charges of being a felon in possession of firearms. He is awaiting
trial. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake