A New ‘Worst’ Drug Stirs Up the Snoops

After life, there is no right more inalienable, no practice more justifiably autonomous, than managing your own pain. Property is not nearly so dear. Happiness, or its pursuit, depends on it. And liberty means nothing without it.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, failed to grasp this fundamental constitutional principle when it upheld the criminalization of medical marijuana this past spring. What makes this decision all the more absurd is the fact that heroin is legal in this country. It’s masquerading under another name--OxyContin--and so far has eluded judicial radar, but all that’s about to change.

Oxy’s active ingredient, oxycodone hydrochloride, is derived from the opium alkaloid thebaine and is most often prescribed for severe pain management. When taken orally, the pills dispense steady incremental doses of analgesic over the course of 12 hours, but drug addicts on the street have discovered that crushing the pills and either snorting or injecting the powder produces an explosive, immediate high that they say is better than cut heroin.

Though Oxy is a powerful, FDA-approved drug that has been on the market since the mid-1990s, it was a sleeper until a recent spate of drugstore robberies, mostly in the eastern United States, caught local law enforcement officers and even the Drug Enforcement Administration off guard. There have been 14 such robberies in the Boston area alone in the past two months, and similar reports are surfacing in Maine, West Virginia, Kentucky and Florida. The perpetrators didn’t want cash--just Oxy, which sells on the black market for $1 per milligram at doses of 10, 20, 40, 80 and 160 milligrams per capsule.

Most patients, who have had the medication prescribed by their doctors for cancer-related pain, only take somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 milligrams a day, but hard-core addicts are developing habits of up to 800 milligrams a day. The police department in Gilbert, W.Va., reported that OxyContin is the “worst” drug it has ever encountered. An ex-cop from Detroit, who saw crack cocaine hit the ghettos there, called Oxy “a nuclear bomb.”

The problem has become such a cause for concern that in June, the state of West Virginia sued the drug’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, for marketing the drug deceptively and too aggressively to doctors, failing to adequately warn of potential abuse and thereby leading to social havoc.

Such alarmist reports and litigious stupidities have got us spooked. The unfortunate effect of the suit is likely that Oxy either would be made illegal or the frequency of its prescription severely curtailed. This, of course, would solve nothing, and Oxy would go the way of medical marijuana. Addicts still would steal and deal Oxy, because it’s unavailability has made its price skyrocket on the street. Meanwhile, patients who need it would be deprived, even more than they already are, of their fundamental right to regulate their own relief.

But there might be another outcome. Maybe, just maybe, this Oxy mess will force us to confront not only the futility and profligacy of the war on drugs, but also the downright unconstitutionality of it. For, as Roe vs. Wade supporters always are telling us, what people do with or put into their own bodies, so long as it harms no one else, is none of Uncle Sam’s business.

The government’s hypocritical and arbitrary regulation of controlled substances continues to be one of the grossest invasions of privacy ever perpetrated on the American people. In the upcoming Oxy litigation, the collective protests of cancer patients and other chronic sufferers probably will fall on deaf ears, just as they did in the case for medical marijuana.