How did this happen to me?

I stumbled across the Mexican border. Beer wasn’t enough. I had taken a summer Friday afternoon off. The thermometer was way past the century mark. I was simply out for a day away from work for a boyish adventure. In the potholed narrow streets of a Mexican border town you can buy anything: prescription drugs, weapons, or even humans. What I really wanted was Percocet, but it is not sold in Mexico. However, I had heard that one could get Vicodin. I had taken Percocet and Vicodin from time to time as prescribed by my primary care physician to help me get over an aching back, and I had enjoyed how it made me feel. I thought that perhaps I’d see what Mexico had to offer and maybe I’d get lucky and add some fun to my escape from the routine.

Tiny shops, crammed one after the other, dot the Mexican streets, and every four or five doorways leads to a Mexican pharmacy. Retirees, free to abandon the aching cold of the northern states, relocate to border states in large migrating flocks for cheap living and abundant sunshine. In the early 1990s, the federal government passed a law allowing U.S. consumers to travel across the border and return with enough medication for personal use. This has spawned an entire industry in border towns, where every other customer is a bobbing globe of gray, looking to stock up on cheap generic versions of Lipitor, Coumadin, and Viagra. In Mexico, prescriptions are required for controlled substances, but the line between what is controlled and what is not, is blurred to the degree that no one needs a prescription for nearly anything.

I wandered into a pharmacy that was down a frightening narrow tiled corridor and up a flight of concrete steps. It was a small windowless room about 15 feet wide by 8 feet deep and only accessible to customers by a waist-high counter cut into a small niche. I asked for Vicodin but was told to come back next week, which of course was not going to happen. I rarely, if ever, visited Mexico. I pressed the counterman for more. It was getting late in the day and I needed to return home, a very long drive. Finally I blurted out that I wanted anything with codeine. He handed me a thirty-tablet bottle and demanded eighty bucks. It was the summer of 2001. That was the first time I ever saw Oxycontin. I didn’t even know what it was.