In the “war on drugs,” Phil Price has battled crack, methamphetamine, heroin, and pot. But the newest drug epidemic — abuse of prescription opioid painkillers— has the narcotics agent reassessing his role in policing America’s hunger for illicit highs.As head of the narcotics squad in Cherokee County in Georgia, Mr. Price has ordered his 14 agents to shift focus from meth labs and Mexican drug gangs to eyeing vans full of average Joes in search of prescriptions for a legal, but habit-forming and potentially deadly, fix: oxycodone. A pharmaceutical form of heroin, the drug is now a top seller, with 100 million prescriptions written over the past 15 years — the equivalent of 1 bottle of pills for every 3 Americans.
