How Did We Get Here?
The Standard American Opioid Story
I got addicted to heroin by what I call the “Standard American Opioid Story.” I had been experimenting with drugs pretty heavily in my teen years, but none of them did what opioids did to me. I was able to pick up and put down a variety of substances, even cocaine and amphetamines, without any real issue. There may have been some long binges involved, but ultimately, I’d get bored with the high or the side effects and go back to just smoking weed and drinking – the normal teenage stuff.
By senior year of high school in 2005, I had come across some large quantities of Percocet and Vicodin and loved the high. I had just started working my first job in a kitchen and could be personable and get my job done well and quickly. I felt good and sociable at school and made my classes a bit more bearable. I didn’t feel worried about my future, what I was going to do with my life, or the feelings of not really fitting in anywhere I had been experiencing. In short, opioids made the teenage woes most of us feel all but evaporate in a way other drugs didn’t. By winter 2006, I had come across large quantities of Oxycontin 40’s, and by the time I was through selling and using those, I was physically addicted without knowing it.
I remember walking down the halls of my high school in my cap and gown during my high school graduation feeling like I had the flu. As our graduating class walked out onto the football field, it hit me: I had my first chippy, or small habit. To be honest, I didn’t think much of it. I had experienced side-effects from other drugs before and had always been able to put them down. Later that summer, I got more Oxycontin 80 mg ones this time to use and to sell, left my mom’s house and got my own apartment with the money, and by the time I finished those, I couldn’t stop.
I didn’t know I wasn’t in control anymore for months and months. There were glimpses in between doses, sickness that was unenjoyable, but not horrific and very brief. I was making a good amount of money waiting tables working lots of overtime and selling drugs on the side. I was living with three other people in a small apartment, and all of us were hooked. It didn’t seem totally insane. It seemed normal. Oxycontin had exploded in that year and all of a sudden was everywhere. People I knew from high school who didn’t even smoke weed were all of a sudden using and selling Oxycontin. A true gold rush fueled by Oxycontin was on.
It was right around that time that the FDA, under growing concerns about the abusability of Oxycontin, added anti-abuse features to many of the pills. Then, whenever the pills hit a mucous membrane, like the one in your nose when you grind the pills up and snort them, like most people do, they turn to gel and essentially mute the high. The cost of the “real” Oxy’s doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, from about $40 per pill to about $100-$120 per pill, if you were lucky.
By late 2007 to early 2008, I had started going to bigger cities to pickup drugs, bypassing the small-town dealers I had bought from before whose supplies began to dry up and prices began to increase. For a short time, I was able to get cheaper Oxycontin and still make some money, but that didn’t last long either. Soon after, people around me starting using heroin or talking about using heroin.
After awhile, switching to heroin became a matter of common sense. I know that sounds insane, but its true. The choice a lot of people are eventually faced with is: be sick every day and struggle to pay $100 for one Oxycontin 80 which keeps you high for a few hours, or switch to heroin where for the same cost, I could be high for a week. Eventually, the same thing happened with sniffing heroin versus shooting heroin, and all of a sudden, I found myself shooting intravenous drugs with no job, with no education, and was essentially couch-surfing before I crash landed back at my mom’s.
So how did we end up here? What if I told you this wasn’t an accident? What if I told you this was an intentional decision, to get a generation of people hooked on opioids? It’s well-documented, and it’s completely true. I’ll dive into this more in my next newsletter.