A Prescription for Tragedy

May 14, 2007— -- Jan Spector, a 58-year-old Atlanta resident, has experienced persistent migraines since receiving a head injury in 1992.

Though he found himself on a revolving menu of pain medications over the years, he says that he "pretty much had everything on an even keel" before he was prescribed OxyContin in the fall of 2006.

"By December, I felt like it had turned my life upside down," he told ABC News. "I felt like what the Oxy did for me was that it overrode some of the other pain relievers that had been working OK. I imagine that it might have worked better at a higher dose, but I was not willing to do that."

Rather than begin a downward spiral of self-medication, Spector sought medical help and rehabilitation.

Unfortunately, many others who have been introduced to the drug are more eager to up their doses themselves. And some doctors who deal with pain fear that OxyContin possesses the potential for both dependency and addiction for many legitimate users -- as well as those seeking a quick high.

Like a growing number of pain medications, OxyContin is a drug with two vastly different faces.

In the clinical setting, it is the trade name for the drug oxycodone, a long-acting pain reliever that many chronic pain sufferers view as a godsend.

On the street, however, the drug goes by many other names, including "Oxy," "O.C.," and "killer." Along with ecstasy, Vicodin and inhalants, OxyContin was one of only four drugs to show a continued increase in use throughout 2005, according to the annual "Monitoring the Future" report funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Over the years, researchers found that OxyContin use increased sharply from 4 percent in 2002 to 5.5 percent in 2005 -- a nearly 40 percent jump in three years.

The most recent figures provided by the researchers show that OxyContin abuse in this age group dropped back to 4.3 percent in 2006. But the news wasn't all good; in this same year, 8th- and 10th-grade students, who had not previously been showing much increase in their OxyContin use, reached their highest levels of OxyContin abuse observed so far.