The American Medicine Chest Challenge

San Francisco, CA: Officers See More Sick and Elderly Selling Prescription Drugs

By SHOSHANA WALTER

In Gregory Watts’s 13 years as a San Francisco police officer, he has arrested countless drug dealers. But only recently did he begin to notice that many of them resembled his grandparents.

Officers in the Tenderloin district on Aug. 31 searched a man they suspected of selling prescription drugs.

Easy access to prescription drugs, the authorities said, has created a growing population of the elderly, sick or disabled who sell their medications on the street, often to support themselves financially or to raise money to buy harder drugs.

In the drug-plagued Tenderloin district, where Officer Watts patrols, sales of prescription drugs have tripled over the past decade and now make up about a third of drug-related arrests. The police said dealers were as likely to stock painkillers like Percocet and Oxycontin as heroin and cocaine.

The shift has fueled a change in the way the police assess potential drug dealers.

On a recent morning, Officer Watts and his partner, Patrick Faye, arrested an older man the officers had spotted trying to sell a plastic bag of Vicodin and antibiotics. Frail and shaking, the man had track marks on his legs, a sign of heroin addiction.

“Any needles?” Officer Watts asked, pausing while patting him down.

“Yes,” the man muttered.

Nicknamed hillbilly heroin, opiate-based painkillers like Oxycontin are chopped up, snorted, smoked or injected for an immediate high. While a single rock of crack cocaine may sell for about $25 on the street, an 80-milligram pill of Oxycontin may sell for as much as $40.

The new breed of sellers represents a fraction of dealers, but it is still a cause of concern for the police.

“Let’s not be naïve,” said Joe Garrity, captain of the Tenderloin district. “A guy selling a few pills — he’s going to buy some cigarettes, a beer, some food; he’s not some highly organized criminal. But he’s selling drugs, and it creates problems.”

Swept up in the police department’s targeted arrests, patients selling their own medications are often penalized as drug dealers. But in San Francisco, that may soon change. Instead of routing some of the dealers through the regular court system, various city agencies are discussing handling individual cases in drug court or through the Community Justice Center, a local court with a focus on rehabilitation that handles mostly drug possession and quality-of-life cases.

Law enforcement and social service agencies said the different approach would better address the root causes of dealing prescription drugs. The reality, some clinic workers say, is that they cannot control what patients do with their medications. Arrests and jail time are no deterrent to a drug sale that could help feed a family — or get a fix.

“We know there’s money to be made out there with selling Vicodin and different things,” said Karen Hill, a nurse practitioner at Glide Health Services in San Francisco, which provides chronic-pain management to the uninsured and the homeless. “That’s just a truth.”

swalter@baycitizen.org