Two years ago, after Jason was in a car accident, his doctor prescribed pain medicine to help with his whiplash and muscle soreness. Today, the Bethany man and his wife are fighting an addiction that has threatened their jobs, relations with friends and family, their finances and their health.
Two years ago, after Jason was in a car accident, his doctor prescribed pain medicine to help with his whiplash and muscle soreness.
Fortunately, they found the motivation they need to get clean.
"Me and my wife want to have a baby,” Jason, 23, said.
Jason and Amy (patients and family members in this story asked that their real names be withheld) are among thousands of Oklahomans, many of them young people, who have become addicted to opiate-based prescription painkillers. Included are hydrocodone, sold under brand names including Lortab and Vicodin, and the stronger oxycodone, with brand names such as OxyContin and Percocet.
"Meth is not the big deal anymore,” said Eric, 20, a Yukon man who progressed from snorting oxycodone to injecting it up to 12 times a day.
According to the state Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, 111 million doses of hydrocodone are prescribed every month in Oklahoma, enough for one dose every day for every person in the state. Oklahoma consumes as much hydrocodone as California, which has 10 times the population.
"That’s crazy,” bureau spokesman Mark Woodward said. "We’ve seen huge increases in the last 10 years, just the amounts of them being filled.”
Dr. Charles Shaw has seen the effects. As an "addictionologist,” one of the relatively small number of physicians who specialize in treating addiction, and a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 26 years, Shaw considers the current use and abuse of prescription painkillers an epidemic. He says pharmaceutical companies market them aggressively, government drug agencies "have dropped the ball” in controlling their use, and physicians who prescribe them get almost no training on addiction. Shaw is speaking out because of his experiences in treating addicts.
"I kept seeing over and over and over people in their 20s addicted to OxyContin,” he said. "Once they took it, they could never get off of it.”
OC, or oxy as it’s known on the street, is the only opiate that can be swallowed, snorted or injected, Shaw said. "It’s just like heroin in pill form. It is worse than heroin.”
The first time Eric, son of an upper-middle-class couple, tried oxy, he was in ninth grade. He got sick and didn’t try again until he was 18, and a roommate gave him some.
"I just really liked the high,” Eric recalled. "It just makes your body feel really, really good. It just triggers your happy sense.” Of course, after using it regularly for a short period, the high goes away, and you just take it to keep from facing the miserable withdrawal, he said.
"I wasn’t doing it just for the high anymore. I was doing it just to get through my day.”
Eric sold much of the plentiful oxy he obtained from sources, some of whom were patients who didn’t use all of their prescriptions, and he used the rest himself. It stopped one day when he was 20 and checked himself into a rehab clinic.
"I was just really tired of having to sell pills to support my habit,” he said.
Oxycodone is excellent for killing pain. OxyContin can last 12 hours. But such drugs also can make any person who uses them, even as prescribed, physically addicted, Shaw said. A person who has used them regularly must be weaned off of them slowly to avoid painful withdrawal symptoms, Shaw said.
Amy, 23, recalls suffering severe headaches, aches and pains, diarrhea and other flulike withdrawal symptoms from the painkillers.
"Basically, it just tears your whole body apart,” she said.
Linda, whose son Austin turned out to be hooked on oxycodone, said she now knows the illnesses he complained about while home from college between semesters were withdrawal symptoms. "It answers a lot of questions,” she said, looking back.
The symptoms were so serious, she took her son, an honors student who quit college only a few hours short of his bachelor’s degree, to the hospital. Staff there "acted really, really rude to us,” Linda recalled. "Now I know why. They knew what it was. And I looked like an idiot.”
For Linda, learning the truth explained her son’s other behaviors that had puzzled her — the dropping grades, the extra thousands of dollars he begged from his parents while still falling behind on rent and car payments. "Come to find out, he was just recycling the money and purchasing drugs with it,” Linda said.
To escape, the addict needs motivation. For Austin, watching the documentary "Crystal Darkness” about methamphetamine abuse convinced him to sign up for rehab, Linda said. Today Austin, who has a good job, is working hard to raise his young daughter with the girl’s mother, who is leery of marriage because of his addiction, Linda said.
For Jason and Amy, motivation came from the idea of a normal life with money to spend on things other than drugs. And more.
"All of our friends have kids, and we’ve been wanting to have kids,” Jason said. "This was just one thing in our way.”
Still, the drugs can be found everywhere, from a parent’s medicine cabinet to friends at school
"That’s the hardest thing,” Linda said, "how accessible they are.”
Call us today to discuss how the V.I.P. Way can free you from your Addiction 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
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