An article in the Asheville, North Carolina, newspaper the Citizen-Times reported on a 20-year prison sentence handed down to an Asheville woman recently for selling prescription painkillers. According to the Citizen-Times, a Buncombe County jury convicted the 46-year old woman on charges of violating drug prohibition by trafficking in controlled substances.
The prosecutor in the case, Assistant District Attorney Chris Hess, told the Citizen-Times that Rider had legitimate prescriptions for the opiate-derived drugs oxycodone and hydrocodone, but sold the pills to undercover officers in August and September of 2008.
According to the Citizen-Times, Rider's arrest was the result of an investigation by the Buncombe County Anti-Crime Task Force, created in 2007 to combat street-level drugs. The unit includes eight Buncombe deputies and three Asheville police officers, two of whom are assigned specifically to work cases involving prescription drugs.
Sgt. Steve Fredrickson, a supervisor in the unit, recalled for the Citizen-Times a recent cases in which a Buncombe County man was sentences to more than two years in prison. Fredrickson recalled the recent case of a Buncombe County man who sold a fentanyl patch -- a painkiller commonly used to treat cancer patients -- to a 19-year old Henderson County man who died from acute drug toxicity. Frederickson feels strongly about it. "If you sell your prescription medication, the charges are severe," he told the Citizen-Times. "People have got to realize they can't do this."
Violators of prohibition laws seem impervious to the escalating sentences, or to the work of the new tasks forces, however. Local experts quoted by the Citizen-Times did not indicate a reduction in misuse of the drugs during the subsequent 13 months since the arrest of the Asheville woman. In fact, Dr. Jason Hunt, medical director of the Mission Hospital Emergency Department, said his department continues to deal with prescription drug overdoses on a regular basis.
"I think a lot of people don't understand the potential danger involved in prescription medications," Hunt said. "They think they're safer." Hunt disagrees with them. "You can get just as addicted to prescription pain medication as to other narcotics. You can end up with an addiction problem or an overdose."
One thing you won't get, though, is adulterants. Unlike drugs produced on the black market, pills are manufactured by pharmaceutical houses that adhere to strict regulatory standards. While that does not prevent the possibility of misuse including overdose -- a growing national problem -- it does ward against the problem of poisonings or overdoses due to entirely unexpected ingredients, cocaine tained with the veterinary agent levamisole, or the wave of overdoses from heroin laced with fentanyl that hit cities including Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit in 2006.
The biggest admission for prohibition's failure came from prosecutor Hess. "The biggest concern to me personally is the amount of those prescription drugs we see turn up in our school system," he told the Citizen-Times.
David Borden, executive director of StoptheDrugWar.org, told the Drug War Chronicle newsletter, "20 years in prison for a short-term error in judgment is a travesty, and it's impossible to look at the record of the past few decades and reasonably expect that it will reduce the problem. Drugs should be regulated rather than prohibited. Once society takes that step, it will become an easier matter to reduce overdose deaths through education and proper instructions, and to keep the drug supply out of the schools."
