Question 8: The vast majority of people who divert drugs are not legitimate patients with pain, are they? Do the majority of drug diverters have a history of such activities?

Raymond Sinatra, MD: And getting to Commander Burke, the vast majority of people who divert drugs are not legitimate patients with pain, they're people who have been doing this a while haven't they?

Commander John Burke: Yeah, that's absolutely correct. This is ... I think what you find is when you look at these folks, and we've looked at a lot of them is that they're poly-substance abusers, they've been abusers probably from their teenage years at least, maybe even before that. And it may not necessarily have always been what we considered illegal drugs ... it may be alcohol also or they go back and forth. But that's a pretty typical I think profile of the person that's abusing these drugs, and it's also a pretty typical profile of those that are abusing OxyContin.

I just read ... I don't know if any of you read this article, I just had a chance to read it today in People Magazine, I think it was called "Prescription for Death" and I was reading through the article and in the very first part of the article it talked very briefly about the hundreds of thousands of people that obtain pain relief, that are legitimate patients. Then it went on to talk I believe about four or five different people, one was a young man I believe who was 20 who overdosed ... sorry, didn't overdose, he was having supposedly a problem with OxyContin and other drugs and ended up killing himself. And all of these were very tragic, don't get me wrong, but they all at least were open enough that when they talked about these folks they talked about their prior history of poly-substance abuse. And I think that's what you're going to find ... in fact, I can almost guarantee you that the vast majority of the people that are diverting OxyContin and using it illegally are people with a lot of prior substance abuse. I don't ... we don't see the legitimate pain patient that comes into the legitimate physician which is the vast majority of those folks, and then receiving OxyContin and then somehow going home and crushing this drug up and snorting or injecting it. It's not the case ... they use it legitimately and they get legitimate relief.

L. Jean Dunegan, MD, JD, FCLM: Bravo for People Magazine, because so many of the journalists now are setting these articles up as if they're Stephen King novels and they are making the public feel extremely sorry for those who illegally or fraudulently obtain these drugs and then abuse them.

Commander John Burke: The one thing I would have liked to have seen People do though, doctor, is I would have liked to have see them have a much better balance with legitimate pain patients. It still gives the general public I think ... you know, this look at OxyContin as being some kind of drug from hell.