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It has taken seven years for the full measure of the pill's stranglehold on Appalachian counties like Tazewell to become obvious--in clogged and crowded courts, in villages whose jails are so full that inmates sleep on the floor, and in neighborhoods focused on leaving nothing valuable lying around. The number of robberies, burglaries and thefts has shot up 48% in Tazewell in only five years, from 483 crimes in 1998 to 716 in 2003, even as the national property-crime rate fell 25%. "People are stealing anything that's not nailed down," says county commonwealth's attorney Dennis Lee. Testimony in a recent trial in Tazewell revealed that one man was so desperate for OxyContin, he traded his mule for four tablets.
Until lately the county was known for little more than its coal mines and crooked roads. While it's true that leaders staged a fistfight in 1800 to determine where to place the county seat--the town of Tazewell (pop. 4,100) was the winner--residents like to point up their law-and-order quietness with the story of how they once put a cow in jail because they could not tolerate the clanging bell. Now the county's crime woes have made it a case study in how prescription-pill abuse has stressed a judicial system to the breaking point, overwhelming cops, sheriffs, prosecutors and judges.
A typical night finds 230 to 250 inmates, most of them sleeping on mattresses on the floor, in the county's 89-bed jail on Tazewell's Main Street. Last year the county spent $132,000 to send its overflow of inmates to other jails. Nearly 1,100 people are on probation for felony convictions in Tazewell. Probation officers handle an average of 120 offenders each; a decade ago the average was 60. Ten years ago, grand juries that indicted two dozen people were considered especially zealous. Now grand juries indict 120 people at a time, mostly Tazewell residents, says Lee. Eighty percent of the crimes involve people stealing for drug money. The local sheriff's department is woefully understaffed, and the five-attorney prosecutor's office needs three more lawyers to meet state standards.
Though Tazewell has been particularly hard-hit, drug-related crime is booming across all of Virginia's coalfields. According to state crime data gathered by the FBI, from 1998 to 2003 the number of robberies, burglaries and larcenies jumped 131% in neighboring Buchanan County, 44% in Wise County, 62% in Lee County and 102% in Russell County. In Buchanan, where the jail typically holds more than twice the 34 inmates it was built to accommodate, the sheriff's department was so bogged down with drug-related crime that it dropped out of a four-county drug task force in order to concentrate on its own problems. In Lee, which has the same jail-crowding problem as Buchanan, local authorities have called on federal prosecutors to help take prescription-pill abusers off the street. The feds can use their power to charge abusers with crimes that carry more stringent penalties. In this rural Appalachian region, which is underserved by doctors, seven physicians have been convicted of overprescribing painkillers over the past five years.