Sunday: Prescription problem is a growing part of drug scourge
By WARREN VIETH Oklahoma Watch on Mar 10, 2012, at 5:26 PM
Sherri Carwithin was lying on the hardwood floor of her south Oklahoma City home when police found her body, clad in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. Perched on her chest was her small dog, Patches, who growled at the arriving officers.
The 51-year-old woman, who had a history of chronic back pain and prescription drug abuse, was last seen alive four days earlier, when she asked a neighbor to give her a ride to the pharmacy.
“She’d been doing prescription drugs for a long time,” said her stepbrother, Virgil Hoye. “She’d take a pill to wake up and take a pill to go to sleep. It was a constant thing. She was never in her right mind.”
Oklahoma’s drug scourge is shifting from the street corner to the medicine cabinet.
Drug overdoses now kill more Oklahomans than motor vehicle accidents, an average of two per day.
Four in five of the victims overdose on widely prescribed medications found in tens of thousands of Oklahoma households.
The grim statistics help explain why Oklahoma was ranked the No. 1 state in the nation in prescription painkiller abuse last year. They underscore a new reality for law enforcement authorities, health care professionals and public policy-makers.
Read the complete story in Sunday's World.
This is the second part of a series exploring drug addiction in Oklahoma. The Tulsa World is a media partner with Oklahoma Watch, an independent, nonprofit, investigative and in-depth reporting team that collaborates with other news organizations and higher education to produce journalism in the public interest.
