Four men, all of them over the age of 70, were busted last week in Prince George for illegally selling prescription drugs in two unrelated police raids.
The Citizen found it hard to swallow that these were seniors trying desperately to augment their petty pensions.
To help us bottle the Prince George reality we talked to someone with a lot of experience arresting drug traffickers - Cpl. Kent MacNeill of the RCMP's Downtown Enforcement Unit - and someone with a lot of experience abusing drugs and conflict with police - Shane "Mad Child" Bunting of the hiphop group Swollen Members.
Both said it was no placebo effect - prescription drugs were indeed altering local minds, but as much in suburban homes as in crackshacks.
"Three years ago I gave a presentation to a group of local doctors about this issue and since then it has only gotten worse," said MacNeill. "You have people who legitimately get prescribed narcotics, or medications that have narcotic value, and they sell that off to a middleman who sells them to a customer base. The four elderly people we arrested were acting as those retailers."
MacNeill said what is lacking is a strong enough tracking system to ensure patients aren't getting their drugs by lying about symptoms to a number of physicians in order to get a supply. Sometimes these people overuse the drugs themselves, but often they peddle them to the dealers.
"At the kick-in on Quince Street [the other was on Douglas Street] we had evidence at the scene of people ordering up to 100 Tylenol-3s at a time," MacNeill said. Some of the drug use is designer prescription stuff, but most are common painkillers, antidepressants, or sleeping pills. "A lot of the abuse is T3s, but Benzodiazepines, there are people in this town addicted to Codeine, OxyContin [aka Percocet or Oxycodone] is a huge huge issue. You would be amazed."
Bunting's main vice was the latter drug OxyContin. He said it almost destroyed his career, ruined him financially and killed him in that order. Now the recovering addict is using his rejuvenated music base to warn youth about the perils of the pill.
"The government is not doing a lot about making people sick with drugs," he said. "There is an epidemic of addiction to prescription pills. I have seen heroin addicts out on the street walking like Night of the Living Dead and I said simply to myself 'I will never stick a needle in my arm' and I was doing great, bro, it never would have happened, except I started popping these things called Percocets at a party, no idea what they were. They were prescription pills, and when I found out I was taking synthetic heroin a year later, I tried to get off of them but too late. You're trapped, then. You are sick more than you could ever believe. All I could think about was doing the pills again. And it's not like by now the government doesn't know what this is doing to people. It is ruining their lives; it's an epidemic. There's not enough control for this stuff."
MacNeill said people sometimes take the pills for legitimate pain, sleeplessness or whatever the condition is, but soon the pill becomes the ill.
Bunting said it took four years of excruciating pain and mental torture to get himself oxy-clean. Everyone from junkies to business barons to soccer moms are hooked on some form of prescription pharmaceutical, they agreed, and without tighter tracking and controls, and recovery facilities, they could only expect a lot more victims going down their respective rabbit holes.
