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One Tough Pill To Swallow: A Call To Revise North Carolina's Drug Trafficking Laws Concerning Prescription Painkillers, Evan M. Musselwhite

Campbell Law Review

This Comment takes the position that when the legislature enacted the statute for trafficking in opium or heroin in 1979, it never intended the statute to apply to prescription drugs containing oxycodone and acetaminophen. The statute was enacted during America's "war on drugs," a time when the country was concerned with the rise of illegal street drugs such as heroin, LSD, cocaine, and marijuana, a time when prescription drug abuse was not nearly as prevalent as it is today and twenty years before Percocet was first introduced.