Some addicts abuse pets for pills; how common is it in metro Atlanta?

Some opioid addicts across the country are abusing their dogs to get pain medication from veterinarians, Channel 2 Action News reports.

Metro Atlanta vets have not seen or heard of a client doing so, but are trained and ready to act if they suspect wrongdoing.

The “biggest red flag” for misusing a pet’s prescriptions is a customer asking for a specific medication or claiming to need a refill much sooner than anticipated, Dr. Lee Pope, a veterinarian at Lawrenceville-Suwanee Animal Hospital told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

That behavior was exhibited by Heather Pereira in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, who cut her golden retriever with razors and brought it to multiple vets’ offices in search of tramadol, an opioid painkiller. When she got it from one office, she claimed her child had thrown it in the toilet and said she needed more, even though she did not have children, Channel 2 reported.

Pereira was arrested for animal cruelty in 2014 and sentenced to four years in prison.

In an extreme case in Oregon, a November 2016 police raid found more than 100,000 tramadol pills and more than a dozen dogs that had been abused to obtain the pills, according to Channel 2.

Tramadol is manufactured as a painkiller for humans, but can be used “off-label” — for a purpose other than originally intended — to treat pain in dogs. About 75 percent of painkillers that are given to dogs are medications originally manufactured for humans, Pope said.

Other “red flags” veterinarians know to look for include injuries that don’t match the story a pet’s owner tells.

“If you say a dog was in a fight, but it has a fractured pelvis, or if a client says a wound happened earlier today but it has been healing for a week or two, we would be skeptical,” Pope said.

People outside of the veterinary world can use the same criteria to watch for someone who may be abusing their pet, Pope said.

Pope and other metro Atlanta veterinarians interviewed by the AJC said he had not seen any clients who could have been abusing their pets in search of pain pills.

Dr. Timothy L. Montgomery, a veterinarian at Dacula Animal Hospital, has seen clients who ask for specific painkillers, purportedly for pets.

“Then the bells and whistles start going off in the back of your head and you realize they might be trying to get it for themselves,” Montgomery told the AJC.

The Georgia Veterinary Medical Association, based in Atlanta, does not keep statistics on these incidents or regularly survey its members about them. While some vets have expressed concern that this could happen, none have reported it to the organization, an official said Tuesday.

A bigger problem may be people bringing pets with legitimate chronic health problems rooted in genetics, like hip dysplasia or brachycephalic syndrome, to multiple vets to get multiple prescriptions for the same drugs, Montgomery said. But even that has declined as animal hospitals have switched some treatments from narcotic painkillers to anti-inflammatories, he said.