Is there abuse of oxycodone in San Diego? San Diego DUI Criminal Defense attorneys believe that new drug-testing practices are one way officials hope to learn more about what they believe may be a growing problem in San Diego County. The expensive, potentially addictive synthetic opiate is prescribed to treat pain, but is abused for the heroin-like high it gives. A year ago, San Diego sheriff's detectives on the narcotics beat said they noticed a spike in arrests related to the OxyContin brand of oxycodone, particularly in Ramona, Santee and Poway.

San Diego deaths involving the drug also appeared to have increased, and the findings prompted the creation of a regional task force in September 2008. San Diego County officials said they don't yet know the true number of OxyContin users and overdoses. Part of the problem is that while investigators expected positive tests for OxyContin in people with severe chronic pain or late-stage cancer, they weren't looking for it in healthy young people, the ones they now think are abusing it. Even if they had, there's no guarantee that OxyContin would have been detected in tests of a 17-year-old DUI suspect or overdose victim, they said. "Having talked to the labs that do toxicology screens for San Diego County, we learned that unless the investigating officers specifically asked for an oxy screen, (the labs) were just doing the 'dangerous drug' screen," reports medical examiner's investigator Jerry Simmons, who sits on a regional oxycodone task force formed last year.

San Diego County officials believe OxyContin may be a dangerous drug, one growing in popularity with young people in the county. But the standard "dangerous drug" screen won't identify the synthetic opiate in the pill, Simmons has indicated. Simmons said OxyContin might register generally as an opiate, one of the classes detected by the standard screen but not until it reaches well into lethal levels. There are specific San Diego DUI tests that can detect oxycodone in blood and urine, though, and investigators are going to be using them more, Simmons said. If police find a 17-year-old kid with a roll of aluminum foil in his car, they will likely look for oxycontin then.

Foil is used to smoke OxyContin, which initially takes the form of a pill and is crushed to make it easier to burn and inhale. If the foil has been used to smoke crushed pills, it will have black "skid" marks of residue where the drug was burned.
Addicts typically have foil with them, or in their cars or bedrooms, though some ingest the pills, snort them, or dilute them in water and inject the solution, officials say. OxyContin isn't a new drug. Introduced in 1995, OxyContin ---- specifically designed to continuously release oxycodone over a 12-hour period ---- gained notoriety as a popular drug of abuse in rural areas throughout the nation. Other oxycodone products such as Percocet typically contain less of the active ingredient and may be paired with other painkillers, such as acetaminophen.

OxyContin isn't entirely new to San Diego. In a six-month period spanning 2004 and 2005, two San Diego State University students and one SDSU graduate suffered fatal overdoses involving the drug. San Diego County deputy district attorneys indicate OxyContin cases rarely crossed their desks back then, while they've seen more than 20arrests for possession since July 2008. It appears that OxyContin abusers in San Diego County tend to be young, between the ages of 18 and 25, and from affluent areas such as Torrey Pines, Rancho Bernardo and Poway, San Diego DUI officials indicate.

San Diego DUI investigators believe young people are getting the drug prescribed for them by doctors, buying it off other people who use, or bringing it back from Mexico, they said. Some may also find it in their homes if they live with people who take it for pain management, San Diego DUI officials report.

San Diego youngsters may think that OxyContin is safer than "street drugs" because it's been tested and approved for pain treatment by the federal Food and Drug Administration but OxyContin can be highly addictive and cost as much as $80 per pill when purchased outside of the medical system. A number of young people, when they find OxyContin inaccessible or too expensive, have turned to heroin, which is cheaper in San Diego County, San Diego DUI officials believe. And in the medical examiner's office, changes in OxyContin testing will be applied to old cases. That's particularly true if testing for OxyContin might corroborate or refute an informant's claims about an alleged OxyContin dealer, perhaps.