Mar. 17--Drug addicts desperate to get pain medication have turned increasingly to forging prescriptions, local drug counselors said Tuesday, the day after a break-in at a south Colorado Springs doctors' office.
"It has increased in recent years at such an alarming rate. It has become an epidemic," said Dr. Mary Zesiewicz, clinical psychiatrist at Lighthouse, Pikes Peak Mental Health's drug rehabilitation center. "We have to be so much more careful now than we used to be."
The Center for Health, 155 Printers Parkway, was broken into sometime over the weekend and employees returning to work Monday discovered that narcotics, prescription pads and doctors' signature stamps had been stolen, police reported.
Police spokesman Lt. David Whitlock said Tuesday the theft is not uncommon and police and the doctors' office alerted local pharmacies of the possibility of forged prescriptions being submitted for narcotics.
Colorado Springs Metro Vice Narcotics and Intelligence unit detectives put out a statewide warning because prescription pad thieves tend to go to other communities to fill phony prescriptions, Whitlock said.
No arrests have been made in Monday's burglary.
Zesiewicz, who's been in practice for 23 years, said addicts have become more desperate and brazen in their attempts to get prescription painkillers in the past five years. She attributed that to the painkillers being prescribed too much and the ease with which it was possible at one time to get pills on the Internet.
"It is very easy to develop dependence on this highly addictive medications," Zesiewicz said. "A lot of people start on them when they're in legitimate pain."
With safeguards against Internet access to pain medication, addicts are resorting to stealing from family members or friends who have prescriptions, then start going to multiple doctors, known as doctor-shopping, or falsifying prescriptions, said Kristen Bilzing, drug counselor at the Regal Center at St. Francis Health Center.
"The drive to get that drug can feel like a survival instinct. Addicts get desperate and will risk their freedom and their life to get the drugs," Bilzing said.
But as savvy as addicts can be, doctors, pharmacists, emergency rooms and the Drug Enforcement Administration have safeguards in place to cut down on the number of fraudulent prescriptions, Zesiewicz said.
Doctors and pharmacists have access to a database of known addicts and pharmacists are trained to call doctors for prescription verification at the slightest hint of fraud. The DEA issues strictly monitored licenses to doctors, though those license numbers were also stolen in Monday's break-in.
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