Hat tip to RE for sending this in, from woai.com:
Be careful who you open your doors to at your “open house,” some drug addicts are now trying to score at real estate showings. The pain-pill addicts are scouring the Sunday paper for open houses dressing up as potential buyers, and then showing up hoping to score.
Amara Durham is an addiction specialist with Caron Texas.
“And they’re there to find drugs that people have left behind in cabinets. If you are having an open house and you haven’t cleared out your prescription medications it’s the same as putting a note on the mirror and saying ‘Hey, open up!'”.
She says sometimes the value on a bottleof name brand medication can be worth $5,000 on the street. As the addiction rate to pain pills soars, so does the price.
“We have addicts who look like you and me and not like drug users in an alley with needles in their arms … combing the Sunday paper for an open house listed there. They go dressed, looking like potential buyers,” says Durham.
Durham says before hosting an open house, take your valuables and your medications with you.
“The responsibility lies with the homeowner and that means that before you show your home, you take those tablets, put them in a shoebox and take them from the home.”
Experts say the number of Americans who are addicted to prescriptiond rugs like painkillers far outstrips the number of people addicted to traditional street drugs like heroin and crack cocaine.
If this had been April 1st, I’d think JTR was playing a joke on us.
I do my best to stay away from prescription and OTC meds… pure poison.
Just a slower day for real estate news.
If I wanted to make you laugh, I’d post this realtor rally video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0_B1vZLobo&feature=plcp
that Video is too funny. Makes me want to hide that Realtor trademark thing on my biz card. Yikes.
Drugs in the cabinets…
Ahh this explains all the OPTs!
It’s not just your addictive pain pills that may be at risk. With one in four Californians uninsured, there may be some of them out there with an eye open for anything they can’t afford. My insulin would be $100 a vial if I didn’t have insurance, and my wife’s arthritis medicine would cost $400 per weekly injection.
Difficult to avoid the temptation of slipping a powerful laxative into a pain-killer bottle …
Sounds like Ryan Leaf was going about it all wrong. Forget breaking into the house just show up to the Open House.
Is that Andy Sipowicz in the background at 1:25 in the video?
Geez, looked just like him!
Sipowicz greatest hits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUjMs1JrhJM
Jim, I thought for sure the video and the soundtrack had to be a joke!
sdduuuude, 😉
“Architects of the American Dream”.
I Just threw up a little in my mouth.