Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict

by Joshua Lyon

  Money, of course. Initially, these facilities are obviously more expensive to set up. But in the long run they save untold amounts of money. “Legislators are always juggling the resources that are getting scarcer and scarcer,” Rothwell says. “It all comes down to this—do you fix your potholes, put money into education, or pay for treating inmates?”

  Joseph Califano Jr. agrees with Rothwell. He told me that Governor Schwarzenegger had been proposing similar programs in California but couldn’t get them through the legislature. “The politics of it are very difficult,” he explained. “But if we treated everyone in prison who needs it, and we only succeed with 10 percent of them, in one year the treatment pays for itself. The problem is, when I talk to state legislators, what they say is that their constituents want computers in the classrooms, they want more mass transit, and they can’t justify providing treatment to criminals. It’s just a tough political call for them.”

  The inmates are going to lose every time, and it’s shortsighted thinking like this that keeps our country wasting money by pouring funds into programs like DARE that do nothing, instead of into ones that will not only help people with their addiction issues but also benefit society in the long run and save tax dollars now used to fill our prisons with returning addicts.

  CHAPTER 16

  Escape to (and in) the Midwest

  I MANAGED TO STAY clean for about four months after my appendectomy. It wasn’t hard. I asked for and received a refill on my bottle of Vicodin and weaned myself off slowly to ease the withdrawal. Work kept me distracted, and I started swimming every single day after leaving the office late. By the time I got home, I would pass right out.

  Then, out of nowhere, Jane folded and I was out of a job. I had devoted a total of six years of my life to the magazine and my identity was wrapped up in it. I spent anywhere from nine to fourteen hours a day with my coworkers; they were family. I had started my career out in magazine promotions—basically, throwing parties. But I wanted to write, so when I heard that a photo assistant job was open at Jane, I fought hard to get it, even though I knew nothing about photography. I knew most of the articles at Jane were written in-house, not freelanced, so I thought that if I could just get my foot in the door, I could start pitching story ideas and work my way up. That’s exactly what happened. I was so proud of the magazine we put out. It was fun, funny, and controversial, and I’m pretty sure that no magazine like it will ever exist again, at least on a large scale. Especially one targeted to women. We had forty-eight hours to clean out our desks.

  I think all of the staff, particularly the editorial department, went into a state of of shock that lasted months. The few friends from the magazine who knew about my pill problem came to me for benzos. I pretended I didn’t have any, but by the time we all met up at Lakeside Lounge for our big farewell party I was already high on Candyman’s morphine. I’d been keeping some in my safety box under my bed because even though I’d been sober, it was easier to be sober knowing there was something within reach if I ever really needed it. And I needed it. I couldn’t deal with people I loved trying their hardest to remain upbeat. My morphine bubble numbed me—I couldn’t face the magazine’s death sober. According to Joseph Califano, this is typical of substance abusers and addicts, who experience repeated cycles of abuse and addiction followed by periods of relative abstinence and effective functioning. Addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease, not an acute one.

  I hate it when I fit the pattern.

  Late in the summer, Emily and I decided we needed to get out of town. She wanted to visit the artist guy she’d been dating long distance. His mother lived near her hometown in western Pennsylvania, near the Ohio and Kentucky borders, and we could meet him there. She had friends we could stay with, ones she swore we could score pills from.

  When we arrived I rented a car at the airport, a huge black SUV with zero visibility from either side and behind. The only direction I could see was forward—a problem because the vehicle had a tendency to pull to the left. At first I thought it was the effects of the Dilaudid I’d taken to get me through the flight, so I was relieved to discover that my weaving all over the road was a result of mechanical failure, not my own reflexes. We drove into the pitch-black countryside, long stretches of winding road with multiple slams on the brakes to avoid the cats, raccoons, and skunks that kept darting in front of the car.

  “Just hit it,” Emily sighed after some brown, shapeless creature waddled out in front of us. I couldn’t bring myself to do it and swerved headlong into the oncoming lane instead.

  Forty-five minutes into the trip I discovered the high beams, which made the drive much less terrifying. Every half mile or so we’d pass a dilapidated house with a sagging roof and a rusted car parked out front. Scarecrows were everywhere, hung on crosses in front lawns in honor of the season. I wondered if the residents just put a bag of stuffed straw over the heads of their front-lawn Jesus, to save money.

  Emily’s boyfriend was named Jess, and his mother lived in one of these same houses off the highway that you barely ever get more than a glimpse of as you drive by. We pulled into a gravel parking lot. A massive barn loomed before us. Moonlight streaked through the slats in the wood from the other side of the structure, making it appear lit from within.

  We got out of the car and headed toward the side porch, which was covered in vines and flowers and a small stone with the words “Go Away” carved into it. A picnic table off to the left of the porch was covered with more pots and flowers. Half-eaten tins of cat food were scattered along the border of one railing. The yard and porch felt neglected yet cared for at the same time—there was an odd sort of order to the chaos.

  As we walked up the front steps, a piercing, drawn-out scream came from inside the house. Emily and I grabbed each other. Jess appeared at the front screen door, totally unfazed by the sound as he welcomed us inside.

  “What was that?” I asked as we shook hands, and a woman appeared behind him, arms open wide.

  “I’m Julia!” she exclaimed as she hugged Emily, then me. I liked her immediately. She had long hair that was just beginning to gray. She wore baggy sweatpants and a sweatshirt with deep armpit stains, but her eyes were bright, her smile broad. A black cat ran circles around her feet, and I noticed saltwater aquariums everywhere, with neon anemones swaying in the bubbles of the air filters. A tiger fish glared out at me from one, and countless striped orange Finding Nemo fishes darted around.

  The same piercing scream came again from another section of the house, and I jumped. Julia threw her head back and laughed a witchy cackle, beckoning me to follow her into another room. Along the walls were six enormous, ornate birdcages, large enough for me to climb into, and massive colorful birds clung to the outside bars. I looked down, expecting to see the carpet covered in bird shit, but it was mostly contained inside the cages and a footwide layer of surrounding newspaper.

  “I rescue them,” Julia explained as a macaw flew from its cage and landed on her shoulder. I ducked down instinctively, but as soon as I saw how docile it was, I reached an arm out toward the nearest bird and it climbed up onto my shoulder. It was all green, with bright yellow eyes that met mine with an even gaze.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” it muttered back.

  Emily and Jess were having a lovefest reunion in the other room, leaving me alone with Julia.

  “I hear you’re working on a book about pills,” she said.

  “Trying to,” I answered.

  “Well, are you going to interview me?” she asked.

  “You like pills?” I asked. The green bird on my shoulder fluttered its wings, knocking them into my ear. I eased it back down onto its cage.

  “Love ’em,” she said and threw her head back and cackled again.

  “Well, then, let’s talk,” I said.

  She led me into the living room, where three more elaborate saltwater aquariums bubbled away. The television was set to a football game, which she muted. Emily and
Jess disappeared up the dark staircase. Julia picked up a book called Magic and Medicine of Plants and handed it to me.

  “You ever heard of bindweed before?” she asked. “It’s supposed to have hallucinogenic properties. I had it growing all over my backyard. The flowers look like white trumpets.”

  “Never heard of it,” I answered. “Ever try it out?”

  “No, no, you have to know how to do it just right, and I don’t,” she said.

  “Back in high school, I heard you could trip if you ate a whole package of poppy seeds, so I did,” I said. “I just puked for hours.”

  Julia nodded wisely. “Bad idea. Now, what we had when I was in high school were Quaaludes. The Rorer 714s.”

  Her eyes got all wide and that huge smile spread over her face. “You had to be near a chair or a bed when you took one of those. It was the ultimate down. Drugs were plentiful when I was growing up. Jess was born in 1973, and back in 1965, 1966, I had a bunch of older sisters. Everybody would just go down to the park every day and get stoned, and there were massive amounts of pills. I remember my mom coming into my bedroom one time, and I had, like, two thousand pills on my bed.”

  “Jesus, what kind?” I asked.

  “I had Black Beauties, I had reds…reds were the best. I think reds were better than 714s. I remember this girl falling forward in a plate of spaghetti taking reds. I was over at her house for dinner, and she just fell forward right into her food. To me, they’re a great escape. Now that I’m older and my body’s creakier, I use them a lot for pain relievers, too.”

  “What about opiates?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, I’m definitely into opiates. A lot of women my age like them. I’m fifty-three now.”

  “Do you get them from legitimate doctors here?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, as a bird shrieked in the other room. “My doctor recently gave me a three-month supply of Ambien, but I have a girlfriend that gets me sixty Vicodins a month.”

  “But where is she getting them?” I asked. “Is she overprescribed for something?”

  “No, she gets them from somebody else who has fibromyalgia. That’s a nerve disease, and all the nerve endings in your skin hurt. It hurts so bad you can’t even wear clothes. Very, very painful, but this way she can make a little extra money. I usually give a bunch of them to Jess. I’ll call him and say, ‘I have fifty,’ but he usually takes so long to get down and see me that I’ll have, like, fifteen left by the time he gets here.”

  I wanted her to adopt me.

  “I’ve always been a big pothead,” she continued. “I’ve been smoking pot since I was fourteen, and if I could only have one drug the rest of my life, it would be pot, hands down. But pills make everything go a little easier. When I take a pill at work, I get three times as much work done.”

  “Do you ever just try to get some from your own doctor?” I asked.

  She got up and drummed her fingers gently along the wall of one of the aquariums. “I’m not that bad that I’m going to fake injuries to go to the doctors,” she said. “I know people who do that. It’s their career. That, and doctor shopping. There will always be somebody trying to make money off their pills. That girl who sells those Vicodins to me, she makes a good buck off of them.”

  “Are you ever worried that your connection is going to dry up?” I asked.

  “No, because you can always find them on the street.”

  “What about OxyContin?” I asked.

  “Actually, I don’t like Oxys, because they keep me up,” she said. “I like to go to sleep. With the Vicodin I have to time the pills, so I’ll take my last one at two or three in the afternoon. I have a lot to do when I get home from work, as far as feeding the fish…” She trails off, staring deep into the bubbling coral of the aquarium nearest the couch we’re on. “I love my fish tanks.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to get back on track. “So you give away a lot of pills to Jess. Do other people ever come to you, knowing you have this connection?”

  “Oh yeah. I sell pills, too. Usually I just give them away, because I’m overly generous. I sell weed to my friend who works at the pet store, and I give him some pills, too. And he had a problem for a while, because he lost the top half of his finger in an accident. I don’t know what kind of accident he had, but he lost half of his finger, and he got addicted to painkillers from that.”

  I narrowed my eyes and looked at the tiger fish. It was staring at me. It wanted my finger.

  “Someone told me a story recently about a guy who broke his own leg to get painkillers,” I told her.

  “I’m not that bad,” she said. “I’m just a child of the 1960s and ’70s. I mean, I’ve shot heroin at a Black Sabbath concert.”

  I was radically, pointlessly, jealous.

  “The person that shot me up messed my arm up, and I got a big abscess. It was real bad, I could feel it going right through my arm. It was very intense. You just…when you feel it, you know there’s a couple of minutes before you do the nod. I don’t really like getting to that point. I like somewhere in between that point. I like to be able to function.”

  “Which is why pills work for you,” I said.

  “Exactly. People will always say there’s an epidemic of drugs, and there is an epidemic of drugs in this country. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that out. They prey on the weak and I have an addictive personality. And not just with drugs. With food, animals…I just like how they make me feel. It’s a great escape. I live pretty much like a hermit. I really like my solitude, and I like being alone with my animals. Of course, I get preached at by my son.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “I’ll make jokes with him about taking twelve Vicodins a day and he’ll gasp. I’m just kidding with him. I only take a couple a day.”

  “But isn’t it kind of weird for him to be preaching to you, when you’re his supplier?” I asked.

  “Jess’s father left when he was three weeks old, so I raised him all by myself,” she said. “Jess is like my father—he watches over me. It’s not a normal mother-son relationship. There was a point when Jess was vacuuming and doing my laundry and all kinds of stuff, and he was telling people his mom was a drug addict and he had to do all this stuff, but that’s just hype. Because the whole time I was raising Jess, there was never a time that I was not able to take care of him.”

  Her body language wasn’t exactly defensive, but there was a sad edge creeping into her voice.

  “Do you consider yourself a drug addict?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, with no hesitation. “But I can quit whenever I want.” And she threw back her head and cackled her wild laugh while the birds screeched in unison in the other room.

  Before we left that night, Julia pulled out a coffee mug with a Native American woman painted on one side of it. Inside was an orange prescription bottle. She opened it up and dropped several hydrocodone pills into our waiting hands, like a housewife on Halloween doling out candy to the eager and overfed brats that we were.

  We drove to a bar about forty minutes away to meet a friend of Jess’s named Elliott. Both Jess and Emily had promised me that this guy had good pill stories for me. I’d spoken to him over the phone a few times over the summer, and from what I’d gathered so far, he’d grown up pretty normal, in a middle-class family. He’d been prescribed Ritalin in the second grade for ADD.

  “I don’t even remember how I felt before Ritalin,” he told me. “After, I remember my life as a continuous series of being really psyched about things, then hating the world. I didn’t understand it.”

  He eventually got Adderall added to his ADD cocktail. “It just got automatically prescribed to me,” he said. “I didn’t think anything of it at first, until a friend of mine who knew I had a prescription started asking me for them. I didn’t really know why, but then I looked closer at the bottle and it said ‘mixed amphetamines,’ and I said to myself, ‘Hmmm, amphetamines, huh?’ So I did some research on the drug scheduling sys
tem and found that Adderall was a Schedule II substance. I realized I had an endless party for free. And it was fun.”

  Years later, around 2005, he was working at the local recycling center. On the job, he met a guy named Gary, who had been in a nasty car wreck years before: he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and driven into a ravine. He’d messed up his chest really badly, his clavicle was now positioned way too far over, under his chin. Gary had prescriptions for both Vicodin and OxyContin to deal with the pain. He’d take what he needed but had leftovers, so he asked Elliott if he knew anyone who wanted to buy some.

  The Oxys were 40 milligrams and Gary was willing to sell them for $17 each, which was less than half the street value. Elliot’s friend Sam had always talked about how much he loved painkillers but could never get any, so Elliot told Gary he could easily get $17 from Sam.

  “When I told Sam about the opportunity, he gave me $170 for ten,” Elliott said. “I wasn’t really interested myself—I guess I just had this idea that OxyContin was too intense. But soon after I sold Sam his first bunch, we skipped class and both took one. We ended up lying on the floor and watching old Genesis videos, almost crying because it sounded so beautiful. It was weird. I never even knew I liked Genesis. At least it was the Peter Gabriel era. Anyway, after that, I started buying my own pills.”

  After Elliott’s night of old-school Genesis worship on OxyContin, he started taking pills about once a week, recreationally, with his friend Sam. Sam would give Elliott money to give to Gary.

  Elliott would deliver the pills to Sam and then Sam would give him just one. “Every time I did it, I’d think, ‘Oh, I don’t need to do that again,’” says Elliott. “But as months went on, Gary started giving me Vicodin for free at work every now and then, just for fun. But then I started wanting them outside of work, so I’d meet him at these weird, sordid places like gas stations or car garages.”