Thursday, October 27, 2005

Oxycontin's Ugly Little Sister

Everything smells funny. The first thing I would notice whenever I would come off the Oxy, was the way the world smelled. Just like a whiff of perfume conjures up memories of a lover from years past, the aroma of the world enhanced the piercing reality that I was not high, and the first realization I had was that life had been going on, without me. I had passed the 72-hour mark, and the morning air reminded me of what life used to be like. Except for a few brief periods of abstinence, I had been high for nearly a year and a half.

My wife got ready for work and I pried myself away from the sheets, still moist from a sleepless night of sweat and restlessness. I was beginning my fourth day and I still felt awful. She left for work and I trembled my way to the bathroom to start a workday with the nagging awareness that it was going to be a very, very bad day. Even worse was the knowledge that I hadn’t even passed the half-way point yet. I had been through withdrawal before, and it took at least a week or more before I physically felt better. Even after a week, when I had felt somewhat better physically, the craving for the drug hung over my head incessantly, endlessly. Because this withdrawal episode was so violently worse than anything I had experienced before, I had no idea what to expect. When you catch the flu or a virus, at least you know that you’ll eventually be well again, and you can at the very least take comfort in that fact and ride it out. Unfortunately, when you get sick from withdrawal, your mind gets sick too. It plays an evil trick on you. As irrational as it sounds, in the midst of withdrawal you don’t believe you will ever feel better again. Your mind loses all hope for the future. My legs trembled as I attempted a shower, and I got myself ready to let reality slap me around like a rag doll all day.

I love my wife. She is the strongest-willed person I know. I admire her ability to do and say exactly what she sets out to do. I, on the other hand, am weak-willed, and prone to impulses. The drug I am addicted to can be a life saver in the hands of a responsible person. Doctors prescribe oxycodone for many painful ailments. Used responsibly by persons afflicted with everything from migraines to broken bones, it can mean the difference between living a productive life or being incapacitated. One of the first times I can remember encountering oxycodone was in my wife’s medicine cabinet when we were first dating. She had a prescription for Percocet, a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen (Tylenol) which she only used at the point where she simply couldn’t tolerate the pain from migraine headaches. Because Percocet requires a prescription, and because doctors are hesitant to prescribe it due to its potential for abuse, she was quite judicious and sparing in her use of the drug. For her, it was difficult to acquire. She absolutely waited until the pain was intolerable before she would resort to it. One sunny afternoon, with a complete lack of respect for the woman who would become my future wife, I decided, like a kid with a cookie jar, to reach in to the medicine cabinet and rustle up some Perkies. My motivation was merely to satisfy my curiosity about the pill bottle marked “May affect your ability to drive a car or operate heavy machinery.”

Fifteen minutes later, I completely understood why people popped pills. I had lived through the 1970s, and I had tried lots of different substances, but pills always seemed like things that were consumed by an older, less hip generation. In the consciousness of anyone who grew up during the Decade of Decadence, pill poppers just weren’t cool. But now, I totally got it. I had found my nirvana. Over the next few days, my hand got stuck in the cookie jar. By the end of the week, my wife had noticed that an appreciable amount of pills were missing from her very necessary supply of Percocet. I underestimated her reaction. We very nearly broke up over that incident. I lamely apologized and we managed to put things back together again, but it wouldn’t be the last time that I stole her pills, and it wouldn’t be the last time that we came perilously close to adding another notch in the never ending calculation of divorce statistics because of it.

As I exited the shower, a wave of hope came over me. I remembered that my wife always kept a handful of Percocet in her bathrobe that she hung on the back of the bathroom door. On those occasions when she was incapacitated from a migraine, she would lie still in her bathrobe with the antidote tucked away in her pocket. While I dried off, I rationalized that there was no way I’d be able to maintain my composure at work while suffering through withdrawal, and because the active ingredient in Percocet was the same as Oxycontin, perhaps the best way for me to kick the habit was to switch to Percocet. One tablet of Percocet usually contains about 5 milligrams of oxycodone. This is a fraction of the 80 milligram Oxys I had been taking, but I figured that maybe I could use the small doses contained in Percocet to wean myself off of the drug. However, grabbing the tablets of relief that hung before me on the bathroom door also contained the pain I might experience if my wife found out that I had stolen her pills again, for the umpteenth time. I paused briefly, and then gobbled down three of them like a lost man in the desert finding water at an oasis.

The danger of ruining my relationship was just one of the potentially negative consequences of taking those pills. As I would later learn, there’s no easy way to break the dragon’s hold. No pain, no gain. Oxycontin addicts sometimes wind up in the hospital with liver failure. The reason is not because of the Oxy, but because of Percocet. I wasn't the first Oxy addict to come up with the idea of using Percocet to mediate a habit. Percocet commonly contains 325 milligrams of acetaminophen. A dose of 7 grams of acetaminophen can produce irreversible and sometimes fatal liver damage. This means that an Oxy addict, who uses Percocet as a substitute, cannot take more than about 22 Percocet tablets without seriously damaging their body. Twenty two tablets of 325/5 Percocet contain a little more oxycodone than a single 80 milligram Oxycontin tablet. Some Oxycontin addicts take as many as eight 80s a day. The danger is obvious.

As the three Percocets melted away in my gut, I felt better almost immediately, but I knew I wouldn’t feel better forever. I had made it out the door and managed to put in a full morning of phone calls and paperwork at my desk, but shortly after lunch, the withdrawals started slowly rolling back in like a tide. I was going to need a far cry more than three Percocets per day if I was going to make it. However, I felt pretty confident that using Percocet would be the best possible way to wean myself off of Oxycontin, if I could only find more. Mexican pharmacies don’t sell Percocet or anything quite like it. If I was going to succeed, I was going to need to find a supply. I had managed to con my doctor into prescribing Percocet to me, so a phone call and a quick visit to his office would solve that problem temporarily. Because I would be taking more than three a day, any supply I received would run out quickly, and ordering a refill too soon would raise suspicion. There are ads for Percocet on the internet, but it is impossible to discern the ripoff sites from legitimate online pharmacies, and at $400 per order, it is just to risky to buy off the net. I would need to find an alternate source.

That’s when I met Sylvia, Catrina, and Victor. Over the coming months, I would make them wealthy by their neighborhood’s standards.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Better Than Sex

(This was written in May of 2004)

This is better than sex. Damn!

A couple of minutes ago, I split an 80mg Oxycontin tablet in half and crushed it with the backside of my cell phone on the center console of my fine European sports car. I ground the tablet into the finest powder I could. The more finely chopped, the better the high. I used the edge of my American Express card to shape the powder into a neat line and rolled up a Post-It note into a small tube suitable for snorting. I had read somewhere that people were catching diseases from snorting drugs through rolled up dollar bills, so out of concern for my health, I always kept a Post-It handy. It never occurred to me that snorting drugs might be just a tad more dangerous than any microbes that one could encounter by using pictures of dead presidents to deliver a high. I inhaled. Everything was good. Damn good.

Because I had awakened only a couple of hours ago, with the onset of withdrawal upon me, I needed to get that marvelous stuff it into my bloodstream as soon as possible. Got to get feeling right. No time to grind the other half. I merely chomped on it, and let the nasty taste dribble down my throat. As long as you chew up the Oxy really good before you swallow, you’ll get every last bit of ecstasy it can provide. Ah, Relief.

I gazed out the window of my car at a big, puffy white cloud against a cobalt sky. How beautiful. Everything is wonderful. I could sit here all day. No worries, no fear, no problems, my dear. I can’t even smell the Mexican border behind me. I can’t remember the face of the bracero who just fixed me up, but I’ve got eight 80s in my wallet and I won’t have to worry about coming here again for at least a week. Well, maybe at least for a few days. No need to think about that now. Everything’s beautiful.

Right now, I don’t care what happens today. I don’t care about what will happen tomorrow. I don’t care about anything at all. It’s all good. The leather seat of my car wraps around me like skin and I am sinking into it like a giant hand, comforting me. I’m gliding down the freeway, part car, part human. I am one with the road. As I approach the secondary Border Patrol checkpoint, about 25 miles in from the U.S. border, I giggle.

My cell phone interrupts the purr of my engine, and breaks up my daydream. I can deal with it. I can deal with anything when I am high. A client? Sure, anything you need. Whatever. But this time, there’s a problem. Something I forgot to do. I was so worried about getting more Oxy that forgot a meeting. This one will cost me some money. Anything that costs me money, costs me Oxy. Now I’m pissed. So, it appears that this little annoyance also cost me a good high. Used to be that 80 mg would last me all day, but after that phone call busted up my buzz, I need to pull over and get fixed up again. It wasn’t always like this.

I used to be able to do a couple of 40s on the weekend and then get on with my life as planned. I miss those days. Now I can’t seem to quit worrying about running out. With each hit I take, I am one step closer to running out. I used to be able to chew up a half tablet, sip a glass of Scotch and enjoy a night of total pleasure. Everything is so pleasant when I am high. The simplest of objects seems wonderful to hold, to look at. Even network TV is interesting. The dullest of companions has something interesting to say. The most mundane tasks are accomplished without boredom. I don’t need food, and sometimes I think I probably don’t even need air. The earth’s crust is a giant piece of foam rubber, and I bounce upon it when I walk, or maybe I am floating. Where there used to be dark clouds of doubt, worry, and frustration, there are blue skies filled with infinite possibilities. But lately, those blue skies have been darkened by a nagging reminder that I am going to need to make sure I have enough Oxy to make it through tomorrow, because if I don’t, tomorrow will be intolerable. I know I’ve got a problem, but I am going to take care of it, tomorrow. What bothers me though, is that deep down inside, I know today is the tomorrow of a thousand yesterdays that I have put off time and time again.

How did I get here? After all, the government had made sure I was warned. I remember my seventh-grade health class in the early 1970s. The teacher, Mr. Clark, would utilize the most progressive teaching tool of the day: the filmstrip. A tape player or phonograph would play an audio text while a strip of 35 millimeter film was threaded through a projector one frame at a time. The narrator of the audio text would pause and a beep tone would indicate to the classroom’s audio-visual geek that the film should be advanced to the next frame. Every week we’d receive another hi-tech (at the time) admonishment of some health related issue that existed in the big-bad-world outside the classroom. We’d learn the dangers of drinking and driving as the narrator described blood alcohol content while the film strip projected horrid scenes of carnage from alcohol related car accidents. When we weren’t viewing the horrors of strewn body parts and blood stained vehicles, we were warned, in Technicolor, of the dangers of “Social Disease” and premarital sex. The filmstrips about the dangers of drugs still stand out in my mind. I remember seeing pictures of Hippies with flowers in their hair at rock concerts having what looked like the best time of their lives. Ultimately though, the filmstrip Hippies would later be depicted with needles in their arms, passed out beside a garbage can or being hauled away to prison. I remember thinking to myself that I would never, ever become like one of “those people.”

In fact, I wasn’t like “those people.” After all, I was driving a fine European sports car, had a beautiful wife, house, and a successful career. I had all those things that made me a good American, but underneath it all, the only thing that now separated me from “those people” was that I wasn’t (yet) lying in a pool of vomit somewhere, and although I didn’t have a needle in my arm, the monkey on my back bore a striking resemblance to the one perched upon the shoulder of the Hippies in the filmstrip some 25 years earlier. Mr. Clark never told me it would be like this.

It wasn’t just the school system that tried to keep me out of this predicament either. The church made damn sure I was warned about the temptations of the flesh. I learned in Sunday school that my body is a temple, a gift from God that I shouldn’t misuse or abuse. I remember being told that pleasure is a sin, and that those who indulge the pleasures of the body would forever be condemned to the misery of hell. I make my tax-deductible charitable donations, give money to the poor, and treat my fellow man with kindness and respect. But here I was, a grown-up man, who never hurt anybody, enduring the daily hell of addiction. I always thought the church taught that hell occurred in the hereafter, not the here and now. Perhaps I should have listened. The devil was on my tail here on earth, any day I ran out of Oxy.

Oxycontin tablets fit nicely in a wallet, on an airplane, in a desk drawer, or a book-bag at school. They require no expensive or cumbersome accessories, like syringes. They leave no unusual odors, like a pipe. Oxycontin leaves few visible signs like injection marks, bloodshot eyes, or revealing breath. And, if anyone becomes aware of your little habit, you can always pass it off as a legitimate treatment prescribed by your very own doctor. Oxy is the perfect drug, with the perfect high. You won’t be incapacitated, won’t stumble, hallucinate, or likely give yourself away. Board meetings are no longer “bored” meetings, isolation is joy, havoc is peace, despair turns to carefree, and all is well. Life is a seat on a big puffy cloud and smiles are easy to come by.

Oxy is perfect, or at least it seems that way. There is absolutely nothing that doesn’t feel better without Oxy. Physically, your body feels lighter, your pace slows down, and you feel comfortable no matter where you sit, stand, or move. You sleep well, eat less, and there isn’t a single pain in your body that matters. How could something so perfect be so bad? When I think about what the answer to that question might be, several possibilities come to mind, but none more important than the fact that: because Oxy makes everything seem so pleasurable, nothing else can ever be so pleasurable on its own. For example, would you really want something to be “better than sex?” If something really was “better than sex,” wouldn’t that “something” lessen and cheapen what most of us consider one of the most important aspects of being human? If you find something that really was better than the most wonderful thing you could ever experience, then whatever that “thing” is will become pretty underrated, and that is exactly what Oxy does. Oxy, in and of itself is not bad. Yet, Oxy, as perfect as it is, makes everything else in life seem less worthwhile in its absence.

For right now though, there are seven 80 mg Oxycontin tablets left in my wallet. So, I’m off to my private heaven. I will stop at the rest area ahead, just off the highway. I will pull over there, park myself on a picnic bench underneath a shade tree and grind up another tablet. There, my busted high will get fixed up and I won’t worry at all about the meeting I missed or the client I pissed off. And isn’t that what we all want: to be free from our cares? I can feel good about disregarding everything I don’t like about life when I am high. Oxy is perfect, isn’t it?

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Withdrawal

My hands feel like they are encased in two large blocks of ice. They feel like they are on fire, and as if they are frozen, all at the same time. The feeling is similar to the type of burn one might get reaching into a refrigerator, touching a frozen piece of metal.

I am lying on a bed in an unused, extra bedroom in our house. My wife kicked me out of our bed hours ago because of my restlessness. I can’t stay still. My legs, arms, and body feel uncomfortable no matter what position I lay. Everything that touches me feels like it shouldn’t be there, and the only relief is to move.

The sheets are soaked through to the mattress. Every inch of my body is oozing sweat. Every body part alternates between feeling searing heat and freezing cold. Right now my hands feel like I have set them upon a stove top and my back feels as though I were lying down naked on an ice rink. In a few moments it may change and the sweat on my back will feel like boiling hot oil.

I am trembling and jerking. The jerking streaks through me like a jolt of electricity, a convulsion that occurs every few moments. The cold ball of ice in my gut makes my entire thorax quiver, oddly resembling the way I’ve felt when standing in front of a large audience delivering a speech, like stage-fright.

My nose is running and my eyes are burning. Goose-bumps appear and then evaporate in patches all over my body. I have vomited twice in the past hour, and when I am not throwing-up, I crawl to the bathroom with violent diarrhea. I cannot walk without holding on to a wall. My legs and arms have barely the strength to lift their own weight.

It has been eight hours since I broke down and revealed my relapse to my wife. It has been 12 hours since my last dose.

The first time I realized I was hooked was also the first time I had experienced any sort of withdrawal symptoms. It occurred about a month or so after I first discovered Oxycontin. This was during a period of time when I would buy a handful of pills, enjoy them for a couple of days, and when they were gone, I would go for several days without them. No problem. I would casually pick up some Oxys before a big weekend, and when they were gone, I would go without them until the next “Special Occasion” came along. I did not realize that my Special Occasions were becoming more and more frequent. Nice weather and a sunny day were grounds for celebration. As the Special Occasions became more commonplace than extraordinary, I was only going for one or two days without buying Oxycontin, but either I wasn’t conscious of this fact or, more likely, wasn’t aware of the repercussions.

I remember waking up one morning realizing something was wrong. I had been using about two or three 40mg Oxys for several days and I had consumed the last pill the previous evening. As I made my way to work, I felt very tired and my energy was depleted. As I approached my office I barely had the energy to get from the parking lot to the front door. Coffee and Red Bull seemed to have no effect toward increasing my energy. I thought that perhaps I was catching a cold. The suspicion that I was going through withdrawal didn’t occur to me until the day afterward. It got worse.

By the second day, I was feeling frozen cold from the inside and I visited the bathroom every 30 minutes. I was weaker than the day before. It still hadn’t fully dawned on me that I was going through withdrawal. I simply assumed I had a cold or simply wasn’t feeling well. This provided the impetus for another Special Occasion, I reasoned. Off I went in search of my magic bullets. Thirty minutes after I scored, the frost melted from my frame, my head was clear, and I could leap tall buildings in a single bound. That’s the exact moment I knew I was hooked. I knew the reason I had felt sick was because I ran out of drugs and what made me feel better was getting high again.

As I drove away from my connection, feeling revived, I had a thought. There are many thoughts in a person’s life, but none more pivotal than the thought that “I have become…something.” These “becoming” thoughts are the kind of thoughts that acknowledge the realization that one’s life will never be the same, like “I have become…bankrupt,” “I have become…a convict,” “I have become…disfigured.” My pivotal thought was “I have become…a drug addict.” However, what makes this sickness so insidious is the fact that I didn’t care. It didn’t shock me to the core like the revelation one might have upon finally realizing they’ve committed some crime and are on their way to prison, but it should have. I was high, and when I was high, there was nothing that could bring me down...at least, not until I ran out of dope.

What I didn’t know then was that I would go through withdrawals many more times, with each time becoming successively more painful. Had I known then that I would wind up on a mattress, like a sponge, soaked with tears and sweat, I wonder if I would have quit. After confessing to my wife, we talked and I cried for several hours. After all we had been through in the past with my drug use and my lying to hide it, she could not believe we were reliving it all over again. On top of the pain I was about to experience, there was the realization that I had imperiled something far more precious to me than drugs: my wife and family.

I get a kick out of seeing the medical description of opiate withdrawal. It is so often compared with the symptoms of flu. What the medical literature cannot possibly describe is something that transcends the physical characteristics of withdrawal. Medical literature fails to include the emotional effects of withdrawal. Never have I felt so hopeless, helpless, and bitterly depressed as I have during withdrawal, and this was the worst ever. The despair is piercing.

I could not stop crying. After the sun rose, I managed to crawl out from under the tangled, wet sheets. I wandered into our back yard and collapsed, crying and vomiting. My wife had errands to take care of that Saturday morning and needed to leave. She had never seen me so incapacitated. I have often wondered what she must have been feeling at the time. On the one hand, she loves me very much, yet on the other hand I was a liar and a cheat, secretly getting high and spending our hard-earned cash on something I loved more than her. Here I was, completely helpless yet undeserving of empathy. I was a wretched splatter of vomit smeared clothing and frayed nerves, wailing like a baby in the grass of our middle-class back yard. Like a waterfall, a half-year of deceit and self-abuse was crashing down upon me. For the first time in my life I knew what it felt like to want to be dead. I could not feel the future. The future seemed futile.

As my wife prepared to leave, I sobbed incontrollably. The thought of being alone was too much for me to withstand. I spent the next eight hours crying and wretching in despair. The physical symptoms of withdrawal are intense, much more so than any flu I have ever had, but I can truly say that the emotional symptoms are the worst experience I have ever endured. To put the experience into words is difficult, but I can best explain it as the same intense feeling one might have at the death of a loved one or at the termination of a cherished relationship. It is this deep sad feeling, combined with fear, that best approximates the experience.

I tried as best I could to keep my mind together until my wife returned, but it was of little use. Somehow, I managed to pick up the phone book and contact a psychiatrist specializing in drug addiction who was available that afternoon. When my wife returned, we went to meet him at a nearby hospital. We arrived, me in tatters, and spent about an hour talking to him about approaches to the problem. He turned out to be some sort of an arrogant advocate for a treatment center, and confidently informed us that the only hope for me would be to enter an in-patient treatment center immediately. Most in-patient treatment programs require a 28-day stay. Because of the characteristics of my job we decided that an in-patient treatment center would not be an option for me. The psychiatrist pushed the treatment center upon us with the skill and tact of a salesman hawking time-share condos. He offered to give me a prescription for enough Methadone to make me well until Monday morning, when I could check in to the center. However, this offer of mercy was conditioned upon my checking in with the particular treatment facility he was pitching, which of course, he worked for on-the-side. The only other option he provided us with was to ride out the storm.

The psychiatrist-salesman had mentioned to my wife and me that an in-patient treatment center would probably prescribe diazepam (Valium) during the worst part of the withdrawals, to help me sleep off the experience. Fortunately, Valium is just one of the many a la carte items on the menu at Mexico’s pharmacies, and I happened to have some in stock (I’m not quite sure why. I never found a use for it other than helping to overcome an occasional sleepless night.) Over the next two days, my wife gave me a 20mg Valium tablet every six hours or less. It would knock me out for several hours and I would awaken again to the fear, despair, and pain.

By late Sunday evening I was able to walk again. I was feeling better, but not by much, just enough to keep me from shaking and crying uncontrollably. I had racked up almost 72 hours of clean-time, but I still felt half-dead and half not wanting to live. I had my fill of Oxycontin. I was done. I could not go through this again. I wanted to be alive again so badly, but I felt like it would be easier to simply die. Never again, I thought, would I go through withdrawal. The pain was too much, both physically and emotionally, but mostly emotionally. Oxycontin was an evil monster that I would need to slay. In fact, I did stop using Oxycontin, but my troubles were far from over. I was about to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

About this Blog

For the past ten years I have been writing about my experience using oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin, Percocet, and other prescription painkillers. I eventually developed a tolerance, then dependence, and became addicted. My archive covers my abuse of these drugs and my effors to quit using them.

I have tried to accurately report my experience without a sense of advocacy. It is my hope that you'll be able to make your own conclusions, as well as find my story factual, informative, and interesting.