Free Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict by Joshua Lyon Page A

withdrawal symptoms at the time, but I didn’t know it. I started having these emotional seizures. My body would be gripped by total anxiety and panic, followed by hysterical crying jags.”
    Heather called her husband home from work to take care of her. “He didn’t know what was wrong with me. He was, like, ‘I just married a mental patient.’ I was crying nonstop, couldn’t eat, but was vomiting, shitting…on myself at some points. I can’t believe I didn’t connect the dots at the time. That I had stopped taking all those pills too suddenly.”
    She finally called her grandmother, who had managed to stabilize her own bipolar disorder for years. She sent Heather to another psychiatrist, who prescribed more Xanax, but at four times the dosage. Heather’s original Dr. Feelgood had given her 0.5 milligram pills to take as needed, but her new doctor put her on 2 milligram pills, three times a day. She didn’t question a thing, figuring the doctor knew what was best for her.
    But from there, everything started spiraling out of control. Shehad an unlimited supply of bricks (the 2 milligram tablets of Xanax come in little bars, commonly called “bricks,” which can be broken into two 1 milligram segments or four 0.5 milligram segments). But Heather missed the combination of painkillers with her Xanax, so she began to doctor-shop.
    Unfortunately for legitimate physicians, doctor shopping is incredibly easy now, thanks to the Internet. Before, crafty addicts had to rely on a hard copy of the Physicians Desk Reference to look up different pills and prescription info so they would know what to ask for. Now all they have to do is look up a pill online, see which symptoms match, and go to as many different doctors as they can until they find one who will prescribe what they want.
    One of the biggest problems with dispensing pain medication is that there is no concrete way to measure pain in a patient. The closest thing doctors have now is the faces pain scale, an assessment tool originally designed for use with preverbal patients (that is, young children) and later used with non-English-speaking patients, the elderly, and just about everyone else. It’s a chart of six simply drawn faces that range from happy to crying hysterically. You’re supposed to tell your doctor which one best represents the intensity of the pain you are experiencing. Sometimes the doctor then correlates the face you choose with a number ranging from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning “no pain” and 10 meaning “the worst pain you can imagine” or “the worst pain you’ve ever had.” It’s an absurd practice, and one that is extremely easy to manipulate if you have even the most rudimentary acting skills. Heather, for example, used to walk into a doctor’s office hunched over and use sciatica as an excuse to get painkillers. Some experts believe that such fakery is usually easy to spot. But pain is also an entirely subjective experience. Some people, especially men, may be feeling a lot of pain but downplay it in order to look tough, while someone who is really only in moderate pain may claim a higher number to get more drugs. Additionally, researchers at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine studied the density of nerve fibers in women and men to investigate whether enhanced pain perception in some women has psychological, cultural, social, or anatomical roots. They found that women may have up to twice as many nerve fibers in theskin as men, so they feel some types of pain more intensely than men. Before I’d discovered pills, I’d always used pain as a secret, personal badge of honor. If I had cut myself on something or was sore from swimming, I just sucked it up. It made me feel strong, like I could get through anything.
    Heather’s doctor shopping went like this: she’d go onto her insurance company’s website and go through the entire alphabet of doctors in New York that accepted her health coverage. “I didn’t want to pay