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.