Tom Bour used to steal painkiller injections from patients at his nursing job at Athens Regional Medical Center.
Then, he'd sneak into a bathroom to shoot them up, all the while trying to hide his debilitating addiction to narcotics. But 13 years ago, Bour learned that drugs or alcohol really weren't his problem.
"My problem was me," said Bour, who successfully sought treatment and now sponsors other addicts through 12-step recovery programs. "What I've been given in recovery is truly a gift."
Unfortunately, some other Georgians have not fared so well. Which is why a conference room full of medical and law enforcement professionals were listening Wednesday to a recounting of Bour's troubled past, hoping to find in it a solution for the present.
The impetus for this week's Summit on Prescription Drug Abuse at Georgia State University was a growing body of research that indicates prescription drug abuse has reached unprecedented proportions in Georgia and across the nation.
Nationally, there has been a tenfold increase in prescription drug-related deaths over the past four decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Georgia, six times more people died from prescription drug overdoses in 2009 than from all other illegal drugs, said Sally Quillian Yates, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.
The most common drugs contributing to in those deaths were Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication, followed by methadone, hydrocodone and oxycodone, which are all pain relievers.
"People just don't realize the danger of prescription drugs," Yates said. "They have a false sense of security."
Kris Sperry, the chief medical examiner at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said he does two or three autopsies related to drug-related deaths every day.
"It's bad," Sperry said. "That pretty well sums it up."
There are larger public health implications beyond the fatalities, though. For every overdose death recorded, there are 35 emergency room visits and 161 people reporting abuse and dependence on prescription drugs, according to the CDC.
Prescription drug abuse represents a unique challenge for law enforcement for several reasons. The face of prescription drug dependency, for instance, is primarily white, middle-aged and male. The site of the problem is also more often rural than urban.
The source for the drugs is a friend or family member 70 percent of the time. Other times it may be doctor-shopping or "pill mills," illicit pain clinics that dole out large doses of prescription drugs with little or no screening of patients.
Christopher M. Jones, senior public health advisor for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said authorities like him hope to stitch together a nationwide network of prescription drug monitoring programs in every state.
Georgia is one of only a handful of states that don't have one. However, the state Senate last month passed a bill that would create a prescription monitoring program. The legislation is up for consideration in the House.
Law enforcement officials say such a program could jump-start criminal investigations into doctor-shopping patients and over-prescribing physicians. It could also allow doctors to make fully informed prescribing decisions. Currently, doctors have no way of determining if a colleague has already written a similar prescription for a patient.
Authorities also hope stepped up public education efforts, like the summit, and the development of programs for proper disposal of unwanted or expired prescription drugs will put a damper on the problem.
Bour applauded those efforts.
"It's an epidemic," Bour said. "It's going to take people who are willing to step up and do something about it."
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