RAPID CITY - The suspect who used a gun to rob a Rapid City pharmacy July 19 in order to obtain prescription painkillers may have been an example of the power addiction to the drugs has over someone.

Crimes committed to obtain these highly addictive prescription painkillers have become more prevalent in the Rapid City area and the rest of the country, Sgt. Mark Hughes of the Rapid City area Unified Narcotics Enforcement Team (UNET), said.

"One of the problems is, people don't see it as serious as walking around with cocaine or methamphetamine, but these are all controlled substances and if you don't have a prescription for it, you're in violation of the law," Hughes said.

Terry Vicars, 32, was arrested July 24 for the robbery. Police said he entered Walgreens on Mountain View Road shortly after 5:30 a.m. July 19, revealed a semiautomatic pistol and demanded OxyContin, a name brand for a drug derived from oxycodone, and morphine tablets.

Hughes said that has been the only crime of violence he knows of in Rapid City linked to prescription painkillers, but similar robberies have occurred nationwide.

In the past month alone, there have been several pharmacy robberies during which suspects took primarily prescription painkillers.

Three men with guns robbed a CVS Pharmacy on July 15 in Mesa, Ariz.

On July 21, two men and one woman brandished handguns and robbed a pharmacy of more than 2,400 doses of OxyContin in a suburb of Seattle.

In San Diego on July 12, burglars ripped a hole through the roof of a pharmacy to gain access to at least 25 bottles of OxyContin.

Pennington County State's Attorney Glenn Brenner said although he and his deputies prosecute several prescription drug cases each year, crimes involving those drugs are nowhere near the number of crimes involving marijuana and methamphetamine.

He said crimes committed to obtain prescriptions drugs in the Rapid City area generally involve drugs for personal use, not distribution.

"We don't have drug houses for it, don't have people making it or distributing it at schoolyards or giving it to children," Brenner said. "In that fashion, it's less of a concern for us."

Brenner said he believes improving technology used in medical offices and pharmacies will help control prescription drug crimes.

He said steps in technology, such as some doctors writing prescriptions on palm pilots rather than notepads and sending them directly to pharmacies, can help.

"Technology will continue to make it much more secured," Brenner said.

He said it is up to medical professionals to be vigilant as well.

"Since we're in this day and age of high drug use and everything else, it would be wise to limit the prescriptions they're giving," he said.

He said doctors giving out smaller amounts of a drug at one time would make it easier to monitor a patient's use.

"That would hopefully guard against the potential for addiction," Brenner said.

Hughes said investigators must be aware of the lengths people addicted to prescription drugs will go to in order to get more medication.

He said he has seen a few cases of people calling authorities claiming their houses were burglarized and prescriptions stolen as a ploy to get a police report written for the replacement of drugs that in fact were never stolen.

He said there have also been legitimate cases where places have been broken into and prescriptions stolen.

Hughes said about 50 percent of calls he receives involving drugs are about prescription drugs.

"This has really increased over about the past five years," he said.

Those calls come from concerned family members, other citizens and some other sources.

UNET works closely with the state Department of Health to combat prescription fraud.

Hughes said prescription fraud is sometimes done by stealing a prescription notepad from a doctor's office and forging a prescription.

"What goes along with the fraud is 'doctor-shopping,'" Hughes said.

People go to numerous doctors at the same time and withhold information that they are seeing other doctors so they can obtain controlled substances from several of these doctors at one time.

Although Brenner said distribution of prescription drugs is not a common crime in the Rapid City area, Hughes said in areas where it is sold, the street cost of prescription painkillers ranges from $25 to $50 per pill.

Gib Sudbeck, director of the South Dakota Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse, said that in 2006, 432 people in South Dakota admitted abusing opioids, including prescription painkillers. That statistic comes from a survey of people who were in the 61 treatment facilities throughout the state run by the division.

Drugs considered opioids are codeine, D-propoxyphene, oxycodone, merperidine HCL, hydromorphone, pentazocine, heroin, methadone, buprenophine and morphine.

Sudbeck said people often enter treatment because they are going through withdrawal, a family member gets involved or the law forces them into treatment.

One of the 61 treatment facilities run by the Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse is Behavior Management Systems in Rapid City.

Cheri Johnson, director of addiction services at Behavior Management, said 30 percent of the clients she sees come into the program with some type of prescription drug dependence.

Johnson said prescription painkillers can be extremely addictive because people build a tolerance to them rather quickly, which means increasingly more are needed to achieve the desired effect.

"Most people who are abusing prescription pills were doing it legitimately at first," Johnson said.

She said it is difficult for doctors because they want to help their patients by prescribing them something to get them out of pain.

"It's hard to track someone's pain," she said.

Johnson said when someone enters treatment for addiction to painkillers, treatment is usually done in an inpatient setting and by working closely with a medical doctor.

She said clients are helped to find other ways of dealing with pain such as physical therapy and other forms of pain management.

Often people do not seek help for addiction until someone else steps in, whether it is a family member, friend or the court system.

"Unfortunately, it has to get to that point for people to seek out help," she said.

Johnson said after addiction takes over, people will do anything to get the medication they are addicted to because they simply feel they cannot function without it.

"People are prone to use things to make them feel good," she said. "That's probably more so that case than anything else."

Contact Katie Brown at 394-8318 or katie.brown@rapidcityjournal.com