OxyContin maker offers lab help to police after Sydney drug bust

An international pharmaceutical company is working with police to figure out how 25,000 tablets of oxycodone came to be scooped up during a drug bust in Sydney.

Cape Breton Regional Police seized the drugs last Friday in a car at a downtown parking lot. They said the narcotics, with a street value of about $750,000, were to be distributed to drug dealers on the island.

Police said the pills look like the real prescription painkiller, complete with markings that make them out to be OxyContin.

That's a big concern for Purdue Pharma, the company that makes the prescription narcotic.

"Generally, you hear about these kinds of incidents either through things like prescription fraud and pharmacy theft. This is a little unusual because we do seem to have some out-of-the-province involvement," said Randy Steffan, director of corporate affairs.

Todd Douglas Miller, one of the men arrested, was from Montreal. The other man, Christopher John Allingham, is from Halifax.

Staff Sgt. Paul Jobe, with Cape Breton Regional Police, said Purdue Pharma has offered investigators its laboratory services to help track down the source of the drugs.

"They will be doing testing," he said. "We will also be sending a quantity of these pills to our own lab to have tested … not only the strength of the pill, but what's in the pill that could be harmful to the public."

Steffan said the pills have a mark that shows the country where they were manufactured, so the lab will be keeping an eye out for that information.

OxyContin is known as hillbilly heroin on the street. Drug users get high by grinding up the tablets and injecting the mixture. Over the years it became so common in parts of industrial Cape Breton that Glace Bay was dubbed by some as Cottonland.