A Riverside County psychiatrist who drove a Corvette and lived in a gated community allegedly wrote prescriptions in the lobby of his fitness club and outside restaurants for $100 each.
More than $1 million was stashed in luggage at the house of an Orange County physician who sold black plastic bags of narcotic painkillers.
And at one Los Angeles pharmacy, people peddled medications out front while others squeezed inside to buy more drugs.
Health professionals and dishonest patients are diverting powerful and potentially addictive prescription drugs from legitimate medical channels, helping to fuel a shift toward pharmaceuticals as drugs of choice, authorities say.
Pharmacy thefts, robberies and burglaries also are contributing to the problem, investigators say, along with prescription forgeries and Internet pharmacies that require little information before shipping drugs. Nationwide, 25 million doses of commonly abused drugs were reported stolen last year.
In California, where almost 34 million prescriptions for narcotics and other controlled substances were written last year, the drug diversion problem has caught the attention of state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown. He says he plans to upgrade the state's monitoring system to allow health practitioners to check patients' histories before prescribing potentially dangerous medications.
"Doctors and pharmacies can instantly check out if the patient before them is legitimate or an abuser," Brown said in an interview. "We will be in a better position to control illegal diversion."
Law enforcement officials say high-profile accidental overdoses, such as that of former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith, are symptomatic of entrenched abuse and misuse of prescription drugs. The federal government's most recent survey reported that 7 million Americans engaged in nonmedical use of pharmaceuticals in 2006 -- up from 6 million two years earlier. And that usage was higher than for any illicit drug except marijuana.
"Unlike illicit drug use, which shows a continuing downward trend, prescription drug abuse . . . has seen a continual rise through the 1990s and has remained stubbornly steady . . . during recent years," Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told a congressional hearing in March.
And local law enforcement officials cite a surge in the use of prescription drugs as street narcotics.
'Drug of choice'
