Appalachian trend: Elderly selling meds to addicts to buy food

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-eld13.html

PRESTONSBURG, Ky. -- 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.

The woman -- who spent two days in jail after her arrest last December -- is among a growing number of Kentucky senior citizens charged in a crackdown on a crime authorities say is rampant in Appalachia: Elderly people are reselling their painkillers and other medications to addicts.

"When a person is on Social Security, drawing $500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for $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.

The "Free Enterprise" and "Personal Responsibility" freaks who make it inevitable for mere physical survival to be punishable by incarceration.

Who's the knucklehead who is Governor of Kentucky, anyway?

--p!

among the Appalachian folks - and I know them well. They don't see anything wrong with "sharing" the meds which have been legally prescribed to them and getting some money to pay the water bill, considering the severe poverty they endure.

this is capitalism at its' most basic....supply and demand.
an 87 year old woman arrested for selling drugs in order to survive? i suppose it is OK for big business to gouge its customers but we must protect the american way of life from those dangerous elderly.

this is f--ked up.

his unique brand of idiocy. I guess it's okay to possess thousands of Oxycontin pills, so long as you are a right-wing windbag. But if you are poor and sell some to eat, you are a criminal. Nice.

cause of death among the elderly was exposure and hunger. Congratulations to the GOP.

the new drug dealers - the elderly.

We have a 'war on drugs'going on - the Medicare Prescription Drug Act.

I don't see why the gov't would object. Aren't they all about promoting the free market? Hmmmm! Apparently they really don't believe in free markets.
The Professor

not have to sell drugs and risk jail to make ends meet.

I tried finding her addy via a Google white pages search but couldn't find an address. Any help here?

Perhaps for some of them, to quote Bill Cosby "we are dumb, but we are NOT so dumb."



If you're all alone, 87, and making a decision about spending your limited funds on food or heat or painkillers, breaking the law knowing that you may go to a place that has to clothe you, feed you, take care of your medical needs, and won't cost you anything (but your freedom, which ain't lookin' so hot anyway) might not look like such a bad trade-off.

What a country we live in where anyone would ever have to think like that, but I'll wager some do exactly that. Now of course, Dottie only spent two days in jail, but still...

This story is one of the saddest I've read in some time that hasn't come out of the whole Iraq mess.

Let the old people down there starve. The state went to Bush, afterall.

:sarcasm:

no questions asked...

Which, I admit, I rather doubt . . .