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

any more money out of pocket for pills because I needed to save money to buy pills online if I hit a dry spell,” she says. “In worst-case scenarios, I would walk into an emergency room and say I’m on whatever drug, but I left my prescription in a hotel room in Boston on a business trip. But hospitals are the stingiest. They’ll either give you one pill there or write you a prescription for, like, three pills. But I used the Boston excuse a lot in between prescriptions.”
    After a while, Heather’s doctors started to get wise to her. “They weren’t coming right out and saying, ‘You’re fucking addicted and you’re sucking up all your pills,’ but they were pretty much letting me know the jig was up and they weren’t going to write me any more scrips.”
    That’s when she started stealing prescription pads.
     
    Unlike Heather, twenty-seven-year-old Jared fell into his painkiller addiction through nothing more serious than suburban ennui.
    “I never like to trace my addiction to anything that was family-related,” he says. “I had a normal upbringing, there was no abuse, no something where I could be, like, ‘That’s why I felt the need to do it!’ The reason why I started snorting Percocet is because I just fucking loved it.”
    Jared grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb in Massachusetts, near Boston. He’s tall and broad-shouldered with short, ever so slightly mussed brown hair. He looks like your standard handsome boy next door, maybe the one who played lacrosse and was always willing to pump the keg for you. High school was normal for him(beer blasts, Friday night dates, homework), up until his senior year when a close friend began working at a local mom-and-pop pharmacy. The owners had a few high school kids working there, illegally, since they had access to controlled substances in the back of the pharmacy and only licensed pharmacists are supposed to fill prescriptions.
    “My friend started stealing all sorts of pills,” Jared remembers. “At first it was just Xanax and stuff like that, which we would snort. I don’t even know how we first thought to snort it, it just seemed like the thing to do. But one day he stole some Percocets. Snorting a Percocet is a lot of work. There’s a lot of powder, a lot of acetaminophen, and it took forever to crush. There were three of us doing it together, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to us. It was almost like going back into the womb. I felt like I was in total control. I felt like all cylinders were pumping. It was a warm sensation where you felt like you could do whatever you wanted. I felt like I could talk to anyone, and I’d always been a little bit shy, socially. I’d even been to see psychiatrists about it, but this gave me more confidence than any shrink session. On Percocet, I thought this was how I was supposed to feel all the time, and the way I felt regularly wasn’t right.”
    Jared would spend the whole night just hanging out at his friend’s house. He had a huge place and his parents never came upstairs to his room. They could smoke cigarettes up there. Do whatever they wanted. Jared estimates that 95 percent of his high school pill snorting was done in that bedroom. They had a band and would play music, but they never actually wrote a song. After that first night on Percocet, his friend stopped stealing almost every other kind of pill besides Percocet. Whenever he’d fill a prescription or do inventory, he’d just grab handfuls of Percocets. “It was like the Wild West back then,” Jared remembers. “No one noticed.”
    If I’d been as daring as Jared’s friend, I’d probably be dead by now. When I was in high school, my best friend Amy’s parents owned one of the town’s drugstores, where she worked. She too had access to the back of the store where all the meds were kept, but we never even thought to steal pills. In the early 1990s the only pills you heardabout were antidepressants like Prozac. We used