OxyCon Game: Anatomy of a Media-made Drug Scare (Long Version)

In early January, Time Magazine was the first major media outlet in America to report on the growing abuse of a synthetic opiod prescription painkiller named OxyContin. According to the story, the drug was "so popular and addictive" that it was generating "a blizzard of a crime wave" in several "pockets of the nation." While the article admitted that it "has been hailed as a miracle" by legitimate users, it added that OxyContin pills were nicknamed "killers" in some areas due to the rapidly escalating toll of overdose deaths allegedly associated with its illicit use.

These two themes, that OxyContin is an ultra-powerful narcotic coveted by junkies for its uniquely intense high, and that it is responsible for scores if not hundreds of fatalities -- the specific numbers would vary widely -- were to be repeated ad nauseum in a spate of succeeding media accounts. Indeed, readers didn't know it at the time, but the Time piece was only the opening salvo in a sustained journalistic campaign -- conducted over the angry protests of pain specialists and their patients -- which has, in a space of a few short months, irredeemably stained the public image of a medication previously acknowledged as a major breakthrough in the treatment of long-term, intense pain.

Now for a more recent example. "Pain Pills Blamed for Rash of Deaths" was filed by an Associated Press reporter on May 1, and was published in the Orlando Sentinel and many other newspapers. To illustrate the "deadly dangers of OxyContin," it opens with the tale of the tragic end of a Palm Beach County teenager who died Easter weekend from "an overdose of the synthetic morphine," the fourteenth Oxy (as it's more commonly nicknamed) victim in that county alone.

Unfortunately, the story failed to reveal that the young man had a history of substance abuse, and had stolen the pills from his mother. And it didn't report that, according to one of the young man's relatives, he had ingested the OxyContin in conjunction with an unknown quantity of alcohol and Xanax, another powerful prescription drug. And if Palm Beach County is anything like the other places where a substantial number of fatal OxyContin overdoses have been touted in the media, almost all of the 14 claimed deaths were due to "polypharmacy," or the mixture of two or more drugs, often including such potent illegal substances as heroin or cocaine, but this too was not deemed worthy of inclusion in the piece.

And finally we come to Cleveland, Ohio, where the Plain Dealer took its first stab at the OxyContin story on Feb. 10. "Abuse of prescription painkiller spreading: Overdoses are believed to have killed dozens," claimed that OxyContin was responsible nationally for a rash of thefts, burglaries and other crimes and to have killed more than 100 overdose victims, fifty-nine in Kentucky alone. Even more alarmingly, the article opened with a scary recounting of a pharmacy holdup there. A masked man wielding a firearm specifically demanded the store's entire supply of OxyContin. Oddly, the man apparently ignored the host of other morphine-analogue drugs behind the counter, many of which also contained oxycodone, OxyContin's active ingredient, and others of which were actually far more potent and much easier to abuse.

On Feb. 16, six days later, a pharmacy in a Cleveland suburb was robbed. As in the story, a masked man wielding a firearm specifically demanded the store's entire supply of OxyContin. And in this case too the perpetrator was uninterested in the plethora of other powerful narcotics stocked on the dispensary's shelves; he escaped with more than 1,100 OxyContin pills of varying doses.

Could not the Plain Dealer story have prompted some local addict (or entrepreneur) to replicate the act? When you add in the fact that to that point the Cleveland cops had only handled a handful of OxyContin related cases in the previous year, none involving a pharmacy stick-up (out of more than 11,000 drug busts), it's difficult to think otherwise.