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January 08, 2006
Elderly Crooks
Happy Etc. I totally missed last month's crackdown on elderly criminals.
"Dottie Neeley, 87, was fingerprinted, photographed and thrown in jail, imprisoned as much by the tubing from her oxygen tank as by the concrete and steel around her.
"The woman who spent two days in jail after her arrest last December is among a growing number of Kentucky senior citizens charged in a crackdown on a crime authorities say is rampant in Appalachia: Elderly people are reselling their painkillers and other medications to addicts."
And sometimes more. Ms. Neeley, it turns out, was selling weed and methadone, not exactly standard-issue items in most medicine cabinets. But let's not be distracted by this case from the larger lesson: the upbeat in crime among old farts. Since April 2004, a Kentucky anti-drug task force "has charged more than 40 people 60 or older with selling primarily prescription drugs in the mountains."
" 'When a person is on Social Security, drawing $500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for $10 apiece, they'll take half of them for themselves and sell the other half to pay their electric bills or buy groceries,' " is how Floyd County jailer Roger Webb explained the situation to AP reporter Roger Alford.
Not everyone agrees it's about poverty. "Dan Smoot, a former state police drug detective who heads the task force, said the elderly people being charged are not necessarily struggling to put food on the table. 'Most of the elderly we arrest are merely continuing a family tradition,' he said. 'It has been part of their culture for a long time.' " Like poverty, I'm willing to bet. (Link courtesy the Elderly Law Prof Blog.)
Posted by Deborah Branscum at January 8, 2006 06:25 PM