Elderly people are reselling their painkillers and other medications to addicts, according to authorities who are cracking down on the crime they say is rampant in the south's Appalachian Mountains.
Dottie Neeley, 87, was fingerprinted, photographed and thrown in jail, imprisoned as much by the tubing from her oxygen tank as by the concrete and steel around her.
Neeley -- who spent two days in jail after her arrest in December last year -- is among a growing number of Kentucky senior citizens charged in the crackdown.
"When a person is on Social Security, drawing US$500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for US$10 apiece, they'll take half of them for themselves and sell the other half to pay their electric bills or buy groceries," Floyd County jailer Roger Webb said.
Since April last year, Operation UNITE, a Kentucky anti-drug task force created largely in response to rampant abuse of the powerful and sometimes lethal painkiller OxyContin, has charged more than 40 people 60 or older with selling primarily prescription drugs in the mountains.
"It used to be a rare occasion to have an elderly inmate," Webb said. "Five years ago it was a rarity."
Local jails are having to bear the increased cost of caring for old and often sickly inmates.
"You've got to give them more attention," Webb said. "It's putting a strain on my deputies. We're understaffed anyway. You've got to get them doctors, and meet their medical needs."
Researchers suspect the problem is not limited to Appalachia.
Elderly people "may be looking for a way to bring in a little extra money," said Erin Artigiani, deputy director of the University of Maryland Center for Substance Abuse Research.
"We haven't heard a lot about senior citizens being a source of those drugs. We know college students do this. It's not much a stretch to think that seniors could do it, too," she said.
Anita Cornett, a physician in Hyden, Kentucky, said one of her patients, a reformed drug addict, told her that he bought all his drugs not from a known dealer, but from elderly people.
Cornett said she does random drug screenings to make sure her patients are taking their prescription drugs instead of selling them.
However, Dan Smoot, a former state police drug detective who heads the task force, said the elderly people being charged are not necessarily struggling to put food on the table.
"Most of the elderly we arrest are merely continuing a family tradition," he said. "It has been part of their culture for a long time."
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