Rx Drugs: From the Medicine Cabinet to the Street

"It’s everywhere. Everywhere here. It’s really – every street, I could point out a house on every street that I could get something at."
That’s a woman we’ll call Jill.
She’s 33.
We’re sitting at a picnic table at a park in Claremont, hoping the rain holds off.
Cigarette in hand, Jill gestures toward the playground where her nine-year old son is running around.
This young mother is what an undercover cop in Sullivan County calls the new face of the drug dealer.
"I’ve peddled here and there for years, like, little stuff. But I more bought the stuff than did anything, y’know?"
Unlike organized drug traffickers who sell cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines – the dealer of prescription pharmaceuticals is often selling their own prescriptions.
"Half the people that get their drugs prescribed don’t use them. They make money, they pay their bills. For one, job market’s horrible right now."
For many, it’s easy to find the drugs they want.
"There’s doctors in Claremont, I know damn well, people are like go to this doctor, you know he’ll do it, go to this doctor, you know he’ll do it –I can think of a few off the top of my head that everybody knows is gonna give you pain medication."
The legitimate use of pain medication has skyrocketed over the last decade.
As just one example, in 2007, there were 119 million prescriptions written in the United States for Vicodin and other hydrocodone products alone.
And New Hampshire likes its pain meds.
Last year, the state was tenth in the country for per capita consumption of the painkiller methadone, according to the DEA.
And it was ninth in per capita consumption of oxycodone.
No one knows for sure how many of those pills get traded or sold, rather than used legitimately.
But it happens a lot.
Dealers like Jill sell pills they’ve received or stolen from friends and relatives.
She’s been hooked on narcotics -- everything from Percocet to heroin – for the last eight years.
She says she started out selling oxycontin and other painkillers doctors prescribed her after she hurt her back.
But when her supply ran out, she looked for it elsewhere.
She says her sister is dying of cancer.
She gave Jill her own pharmaceuticals -- powerful drugs like Fentanyl, Dilaudid, and Seboxone.
Jill took some and sold the rest.
Like hundreds of other people who move on and off the street, Jill sold pills because the ability to make so much money is hard to resist.
"Percocet are $5 a piece, and believe me, they go up from there for different pills. The price ranges all the way up to $80 a pill."

"They are the new dealer."
That’s an undercover drug agent we’ll call Sam. He asked that we disguise his voice.
“And they’re not the big dealer that people like to read about in the newspaper headlines, somebody who we just seized his house and his car and ten kilos of cocaine or 50 pounds of marijuana.
"Over the past couple of years it really caught on, the word’s out there that you can make some pretty good coin if you can get by, by only taking some of your prescription and selling the rest, and people have gotten pretty good at it.”
Some – no one really knows how many – are people who use public assistance programs like Medicaid, Workers’ Comp and disability to buy their prescriptions for a dollar or two a bottle.
Then they sell them.
A bottle of thirty eighty-milligram Oxycontins is worth $2400 on the street.
And that kind of money entices all kinds of people.
Including one 70-year old man who was prescribed 90 high-dose Oxycontin pills every month.
And every month, he sold all 90.
One of his buyers was a young addict we’ll call Bill Whitman.
Bill, who is 20, has been clean for the last year or so.
But when he was 17 and 18, Bill says he bought from this elderly dealer a lot.
"He needed them to pay his rent and he lived in a trailer and he needed the money more than he needed the pain meds."
Bill says it was easy to find dealers.
The crowd he hung out with knew who to buy from – and when.
"You could always tell when people were selling their prescriptions, or people were buying prescriptions, because like the welfare and Medicaid checks are always cut the 15th and the 30th."
As pharmaceuticals become more and more popular, more sophisticated drug operations are springing up.
Again, Bill Whitman.
"I knew someone who flew up from Florida every month, who had a pain doctor down in Florida that he would actually fly to say, get a prescription of 120 80 milligram Oxycontin, and then he would drive up to Maine, because they’re worth so much more up there than they are in Florida."
The DEA says more and more prescription drugs are coming in from Las Vegas and from Florida.
Florida’s many pain clinics – called pill mills -- are known as significant sources of New England’s street drugs.
This month, in an effort to curb its pill mills, Florida became the thirty-ninth state in the nation to implement a prescription drug monitoring program.
Without such a program in New Hampshire, the DEA says it does not have enough data about sources of black market pain pills in the state.
In the meantime, local law enforcement struggles with the problem daily.
But law enforcement can’t keep up.
At least, that’s what Sam, the undercover cop, says.
"E: Do you feel like you can make a dent? Ummm, no. No. And it boils down to greed and money. If there’s easy money to be made, somebody’s going to be willing to take the risk to make easy money."
Tell that to Jill, the former drug dealer from Claremont.
She’s been in jail and she doesn’t want to go back.
Still, she’s tempted to sell again.
"You know how many times I’ve thought, I can’t find a job, you know how easy it would be for me to go right back to that? E: How easy? Way too easy. Way, way too easy."
For NHPR News, I’m EG.

Reporter's note: The audio file of this story incorrectly calls Seboxone a pain pill. Seboxone is an opioid blocker used to treat opiate addicts; it is not a painkiller. (While it has been shown to be effective in treatment, it can also be abused.) -- Elaine Grant