For months, Schneider discreetly watched the crowded office, noticing the strange hours, the out-of-town buyers, and the fact that when Dr. Casey wasn’t even present, prescriptions were still being written. He collected compelling evidence.
Eventually, Schneider got federal investigators interested in the case, and eventually the doctor was arrested. They also came down hard on a drug network that originated with her practice, arresting her runners. When SUVs full of federal officers showed up at her house, Dr. Casey smiled cynically and told them they were all dead. She had some dangerous backers.
Somehow I spent this same period of time with all these doomed people. I was in all the wrong places with all the wrong people at all the wrong times. All around me there were deaths and arrests, and some of those people are presumably still doing time. Yet for now, I continued to walk between the raindrops. It was as if the Angel of Death was two steps behind me, but never quite caught up with me.
But the time was rapidly approaching for me to pay my dues. Soon, my sin would find me out, and I would finally come to the end of that long and winding road.
Chapter 8
Hitting Bottom
OxyContin made its debut on the pharmaceutical market in 1996. It comes from the same poppy from which we derive opium, which is the key ingredient in heroin. The most active substance in opium is morphine, but OxyContin is 1.5 times more potent than morphine.
When it was first introduced, this wonder drug was a difference-maker in pain management for terminal cancer patients. But its method followed in the tradition of all the opiates: it dispensed euphoria from a handy pill bottle. Or through a patch, a snort, or a shot.
Oxy delivered little doses of the thing every member of the human race desires: a powerful sense of joy and well-being. Or at least something that wore a convincing mask of joy.
It invited you into a world where everything was wonderful, but after a short period of time, the invitation was null and void. The party was over, and just maybe, if you became accustomed to these drugs, you almost began looking forward to the original pain, because it was your return invitation to the party. It was a never-ending journey without a destination. Like a book without a conclusion. We called it “chasing the ghost.”
After a while, pain wasn’t even a factor. Your drug-induced reality was your life, and the old reality—the real reality, where your friends and jobs, issues and sufferings existed—that was no more than the waiting room you had to endure until the door opened again.
OxyContin was the hottest thing in painkillers at century’s end, the time when my Mustang was wrecked. In 1998, the previous year, the drug’s parent company produced a video called, “I Got My Life Back.” Six people with chronic pain were shown living wonderful, blissful lives through OxyContin. A dignified doctor looked into the camera and promised, “No side effects!” These videos were shown in patient waiting rooms of medical practices across America. Everybody wanted a piece of it. Oxy was the new drug store sensation.
In 1999, the year of my accident, opioid prescriptions increased by eleven million. But with that many users, the claim of “no side effects” was quickly debunked. In 2007, executives with Oxy’s parent company stood before a judge to plead guilty of misbranding their drug. They settled with the United States government for $635 million.
The problem was, it wasn’t the U. S. government with the monkey on its back. Federal lawyers weren’t out on the streets searching desperately for a way to feed the habit. I was. My friends were. Hundreds of thousands of us were hooked, and our entire lives were rocked.
In the weeks and months following my wreck, during early 2000, I was the textbook case of opioid addiction. By the grace of God and the love of family, I escaped the death that came to hundreds of thousands of people like me. And though all kinds of controls and regulations have been slapped on the opioid industry, it’s still a problem—a crisis, actually. More people died of opioid abuse in 2016 alone than in the entire Vietnam Conflict.
By 2001, when the bottom fell out for me, the crisis was still working up steam. It was clear America had a new drug-related problem, so advisory groups were being created and research was underway. But none of it was in time to help me.
I had found that, like every kind of sin, Oxy offered the world but demanded your soul. Drug addiction left absolutely no detail of your life untouched, because you’d do virtually anything for that next high. When could I get my next dose? I’d live in anxiety until I had it, and beyond anxiety, I knew there was the sheer physical hell of withdrawal. I knew on some level what was happening to me, but the next visit to my drug-induced state kept me from having to dwell on that thought.
I lost interest in everything else, which is one reason so much of this period of my life remains a blur, like an impressionistic painting filled with dark, swirling colors but little real detail. It’s difficult to reconstruct exactly what happened when. My life existed as a pursuit of a high, and I surrounded myself with fellow pursuers.
Yet my parents and my sister were always there. They weren’t quite sure what was up with me—not at first—but they knew something wasn’t quite right. I’ve already mentioned how, in 2000, they set me up in an apartment, bought all the furniture, and arranged for me to train for a career as a stockbroker. They were convinced I’d be a natural. Of course, they believed I could do anything.
