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Drug Running
By Kinsee Morlan
Staff Writer

Oct. 27, 2004

No prescription? No problem down south

People go to Tijuana for three things: Donkey Shows, freshly fried churros and narcotic pharmaceuticals. Border Patrol, with the help of the RxNet Task Force and the DEA, tries to combat the latter, but it's like using a bucket to hold back the tide.


The flood of highly-addictive prescription drugs keeps pouring out of Mexico and into the bloodstreams of American young people.

Rob, a 22-year-old City College student, recently made the TJ trek to prove just how easy it is to buy prescription meds there.

He pushed his way through the rusted one-way gate and the first thing he noticed — beside the smell of urine — was the calls and hustles of street vendors and beggars.

"I could never bring my girlfriend down here," Rob said. "She would buy everything."

A vender behind a table filled with Mexican fighting masks and cow hooves made into drinking flasks called out, "Here you go! One-hundred per cent off for you!" A precocious little Mexican girl grabbed at Rob's pant leg and held up a wooden snake that slithered back and forth.

Rob pretended not to notice, but said, "Maybe I should buy something for my girlfriend, just so she knows I was thinking about her."

Almost as prevalent as the rows of loud-mouthed vendors are the flashy-yet-sterile-looking "farmacias" that line Avenida Revolucion, the main street of Tijuana, where tourists go to satisfy their every vice.

One of those vices comes in the shape of capsules.

To put things in perspective, DEA special agent Misha Piastro says there are roughly 1,400 pharmacies (most within walking distance of the border) in Tijuana, which has a population similar to that of San Diego County. San Diego houses fewer than 400 pharmacies.

"The demand is there," Piastro said. "There's pharmacies down there dispensing drugs, but those people in white coats aren't pharmacists, they're sales people."

A little nervous, Rob decided to pass up the first dozen pharmacies lined with eager-to-sell whitecoats, "Maybe I should go to one that's not on Revolucion; that'll be less obvious."

The first pharmacy he tried looked pretty legit. A nice older lady in a long white coat approached him and asked how she could help.

"Actually, I'm looking for some Vicodin," Rob said.

"No," said the lady. "No, no. Only with prescription."

"Do you know where I could get some without a prescription?" he asked.

After being ushered out of the pharmacy (and three more after that), Rob finally got lucky on his fifth attempt with a young man who told him to go back to Revolucion.

"What you need?" asked a man as soon as Rob rounded the corner. "Uppers, downers, I have everything you need. Come on in."

Thirty minutes and $100 later, Rob had 10 generic Vicodin, 10 Klonopin and 30 Ritalin. All the pills were conveniently taken out of their original packaging (so as not to set off any metal detectors) and placed into small zip-lock baggies for "smuggling-made-easy."

Except for one instance when Rob swore someone was following him, the trip back across the border was easy. At the San Ysidro checkpoint, he was asked to show identification and state his citizenship. A small x-ray conveyer belt was his only obstacle, but the pills, tucked safely away, were never found.

The Border Patrol does its best, but in the wake of Sept. 11, small-time drug smugglers aren't the main concern.

"Our primary focus is terrorism," says Vincent Bond, a spokesman for U.S. Customs in San Diego. "Terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. That said, we have not abandoned our traditional roles of keeping out dangerous chemicals."

Mostly he's referring to dangerous chemicals like cocaine and heroin; however, nipping at the heels of these highly abused — and addictive — illegal drugs are pharmaceuticals labeled as controlled substances by the DEA. Among the many abused substances on the DEA's hit list are Schedule II drugs such as Hydrocodone (a.k.a Vicodin), Methlphenidates like Ritalin, and Oxycodone, better known as OxyContin thanks to Rush Limbaugh's bout with the heroin-like painkiller prescribed only to severe chronic pain sufferers.

According to the California Board of Pharmacies, prescription drugs are the fastest growing group in the illicit drug market. Mexico is just one of the many factors contributing to the problem. The illicit narcotics also hit the black market via altered, stolen, copied or forged prescriptions, overzealous painkiller-prescribing doctors or kids maliciously sifting through mom and dad's medicine cabinet.

"We ask questions," says Bond of the border screening process. "We look for physiological signs of nervousness. After you've been doing this for a while, you develop a sixth sense."

The sixth sense doesn't kick in every time, but Bond says agents do a pretty good job.

In 2003, he said, California Border Patrol seized 286,847 pounds of marijuana, 12,470 pounds of cocaine, 251 pounds of heroin, 1,252 pounds of meth and a small yet undetermined amount of drugs listed under "other."

Pharmaceuticals fall into that unassuming category.

Is it really just the "other" drug?

"These drugs are highly, highly addictive," says Sara Simpson, RxNet Task Force Supervisor of the Pharmaceutical Narcotic Enforcement Team. "What we do see coming across is a myriad of everything. We see a tremendous amount of Hydrocodone products and Ritalin."

The Task Force's main focus, however, is not on the drugs coming from Mexico. Simpson and her team are kept busy within the borders, chasing down fraudulent prescriptions and taking down doctors dealing out more than their fair share of pain pills.

Simpson says the problem is on the rise. Current Drug Abuse Warning Network statistics point to a 45 percent increase from 2000 to 2002 in ER visits related to prescription drug abuse

According to the County of San Diego's Medical Examiner's website, only automobile-related and cardiovascular-related fatalities exceeded drug-related deaths in 2002. The office reported at least 207 died from drug-related accidents.

"Unlike illicit drugs," Simpson says, "pharmaceutical drugs cross all socio-economic boundaries. The people who are addicted to these drugs are people that work just like you and me. We arrest police officers, nurses, airline pilots, school teachers."

She said most of the people she arrests had "legitimate medical issues prior to their addiction."

When prescription leads to addiction

Martin Reifers, now 21, started abusing prescription drugs when he was 15.

"My mom went on a backpacking trip and injured her hip," Reifers says. "She gets prescribed exorbitant amounts of Vicodin."

Helping himself to his mom's supply, he first started using the drug as a relaxing way of coming down from coke.

"I convinced myself that prescription drugs were okay," Reifers says. "I figured since pharmies were legal ..."

Like many drug addicts, Reifers rationalized his drug use and quickly upped his dosage to as many as 15 pills on a party night. When his mom's supply wasn't enough, he and his friends popped down to TJ.

"There was no communication problem," he says. "Drugs are a universal language."

Reifers was content with his drug use, but he set himself some limits.

"I admitted to being a drug addict, but I still didn't want to use a drug like OxyCotin," he says. "It was the general of all drugs. You always heard about people dying."

A mixture of boredom and an increased Vicodin tolerance eventually convinced Reifers to overlook the risk factor and go ahead and take on the "general."

He describes his first experience with OxyCotin as "profound." Reifers is lucky he lived to describe his second experience with the drug.

"I thought I was being safe," Reifers says. "The effects didn't hit me the way it did the first time. I just thought it was a weak pill, so I took another."

One upsetting call from his girlfriend later, and in went one more pill.

"That's where I don't remember anything," Reifers says.

He woke up in the hospital to doctors and nurses telling him how lucky he was to be alive. After a night spent unconscious on a lawn chair, (on top of the overdose) Reifers suffered from hypothermia, pneumonia and lung aspiration.

"The anniversary (of the overdose) is the 29th of this month," he says.

Anniversary, yes, but happy? Not even close.

The day of Reifers's release from the hospital, on the one night home before he was to be committed to a 28-day rehab in La Jolla, he did it again.

"I still had these two pills left," he says. "I figured, okay, three kills you, but two is a party."

Reifers still battles with his drug addiction. He says it's "not pretty," as he still binges on Vicodin "on a fairly regular basis."

His prospects for quitting don't appear promising. Shrugging his shoulders, he says, "I don't know, it's either gonna kill me or I'm eventually gonna get it."

Maybe he'll "get it" before he becomes a statistic. According to the California Board of Pharmacies, 30 percent of all drug-related deaths now involve prescription drugs.

Pharmaceuticals are both mentally and physically addictive, and overdosing is fairly easy, says Special Agent Piastro.

Someone can become addicted to drugs like OxyCotin or Vicodin after using them only once.

Even with the Task Force cracking down on forged prescriptions, the border patrol stepping up its watch and the DEA being more scrupulous in its investigations, addicts like Reifers will always be able to get their hands on prescription drugs.

Mexican authorities don't seem eager to help and, as Simpson says, "It's another country. We can't impose what we do in the U.S. with what they do there."

Too bad, 'cause right now, getting pills from Mexico is just about as easy as picking up a churro on your way to see the supposed "top secret" Donkey Show.

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