Drug abuse to get attention in forum

Vanessa tapped the worn kitchen table as she talked about how she had become addicted to Vicodin and how a pharmacist's suspicion both ruined and saved her life.
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The 27-year-old woman, now living in Battle Creek, asked that her last name be withheld to protect her children's privacy. She tells her story here in order to help doctors, police, families and policy makers halt a growing problem nationally and locally.

The community will have the opportunity to participate in a discussion with law enforcement, mental health workers and the media at a town hall forum at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 5, "A Dose of Prevention: Stopping Medicine Abuse," sponsored by the Substance Abuse Council, Summit Pointe and the Enquirer at Burnham Brook Community Center, 200 W. Michigan Ave.

There, people can learn how to help protect against prescription and over-the-counter drug abuse and its ensuing effects.

"You hear about it more and more," Vanessa said. "People overdosing, people dying. And they were prescription drugs people thought they were OK to take just because it came from their doctor. And that's how a lot of people also have become addicted in thinking, well, I don't have a problem. They're legit. And that's how it started out with me."

Vanessa first used Vicodin when she was 15 years old and got into a car accident. Her doctor prescribed the potent painkiller in doses higher than necessary for her pain, she said.

She said she didn't abuse it then, but after another car accident at age 19, several doctor's visits and news that the pain in her back was due to a degenerative spinal condition, the addiction began.

"I started using them more as an antidepressant than I did a pain pill," she said. "So it didn't take long for me, after taking them more than I should have, to become very addicted to them."

When her doctor left town, she started writing her own prescriptions from the medical office where she worked.

"It started with me and my best friend, we were joking around one day about, why don't we just get a prescription, you know? Because I worked in a dental office. We actually went through it a couple times," she said.

Vanessa also turned to buying the drug on the streets — $2 for a 500 mg pill or $4 for 1000 mg — with money she had saved for retirement, taking between 10 and 24 pills a day. When that money ran out, she'd do odd jobs for friends or scrap metal for cash.

"If you really wanted it, there was a way to get it," she said.

Her workplace eventually caught her when a suspicious pharmacist alerted the authorities and she ended up with a felony.

"It ruined my whole life," she said of the pharmacist's call. "In a way it was good, because I probably would have ended up killing myself, taking as many pills as I was doing and not meaning to. Probably would have ODed, or something. But, no, I am thankful that that happened. I'm more mad at myself for even doing that, not thinking about the consequences."

Now clean and getting help, Vanessa said she's turning her life around so she can regain custody of her kids.

She regrets the choices she made to abuse a medicine, but also hopes someone will figure out how to stop it from happening to others.

"And especially prescription drugs are so easy to get because they are legal for a lot of people," she said. "I actually have known people that just get a prescription to sell them, because they know people will buy them."

These are issues law enforcement, doctors and families need to face. At the town hall meeting, they hope to have a dialogue with the community to find out what they can do better and inform the community of what it can do to stop medicine abuse.

Call us today to discuss how the V.I.P. Way can free you from your opiate dependency and get your life back. Call today: (800)276-7021 or (702)308-6353 Email: info@rapiddetoxlasvegas.com Medical Director: Board-Certified by American Board of Anesthesiology 1994, former chief of cardiac anesthesia, University of Nevada School of Medicine. Board-Certified by American Board of Pain Medicine 1997, Clinical Assistant Professor University Nevada School of Medicine.