Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict Read Free Page A

dangerous when used incorrectly.
    Regardless of how or where someone gets their first taste of prescription painkillers (through a friend, a surgical procedure, a parent’s medicine cabinet, or, say, a journalism assignment), the one common factor that can contribute to continued, abusive intake is that there’s a presumed element of safety to prescription painkillers that doesn’t exist with any other kind of drug out there, except maybe benzodiazepines like Valium or Xanax.
    Even for the bravest thirteen-year-old, smoking your first joint is going to be a little bit terrifying, but that’s part of the initiation, part of the excitement. It’s the gateway to your cool older sibling’s life or your foray into the bad kids’ world that you’ve always looked at wistfully from afar. But with pills, you know that somewhere down the line, it came from a doctor. A safe, kindly doctor who knew just what you needed and would never distribute something that could potentially hurt you.
    During my years of pill abuse after that initial first bottle, I knewI wasn’t alone in my use, so I didn’t feel much shame. All I had to do was turn on the TV or go to the movies to see that everyone else was doing it too. The media hadn’t dubbed us “Generation Rx” for nothing. In the American remake of the Japanese film The Ring, the doomed private-school girls in the opening scene aren’t looking to raid the liquor cabinet when their parents aren’t home—they just want to know where the mother hides her Vicodin. On the television series House , the brilliant doctor saves life after life while popping loads of Vicodin. The awesomely trashy ladies from Sordid Lives are downing Valium in practically every scene.
    Pill use is a ubiquitous element in celebrity tabloids too. Witness Winona Ryder’s inexplicable shoplifting spree in 2001: she was busted with several illegal bottles of prescription painkillers. According to USA Today, she had used six different aliases while seeking prescription drugs. She had thirty-seven prescriptions filled by twenty doctors over a three-year span, a method known as “doctor shopping.”
    Mischa Barton’s younger sister has checked herself into rehab for painkiller abuse, as have Robbie Williams, Matthew Perry, Melanie Griffith, Jamie Lee Curtis, Charlie Sheen, and Kelly Osborne, just to name a few. Conservative kingpin Rush Limbaugh was booked on charges of doctor shopping for his Vicodin addiction. When Nicole Richie was arrested for driving the wrong way on the highway in Burbank she admitted to police that she had taken Vicodin that night (citing menstrual cramps). For a while, Lindsay Lohan’s own father wouldn’t stop talking to the press about his famous daughter’s addiction to painkillers. And because the autopsy report showed Heath Ledger’s death to be an accidental combination of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine, the specter of pills will unfortunately always hang around his name.
    John F. Kennedy Jr.’s use of methamphetamines and pills has been well documented. His supplier was a German refugee doctor named Max Jacobson. Max was one of the original famous “Dr. Feel-goods,” a doctor who just doles out whatever pills you want without really taking into consideration any sort of actual diagnosis. (His other nickname was “Miracle Max.”) Other celebrity clients of hisincluded Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, and it’s rumored that he was Andy Warhol’s Factory Kids’ supplier as well.
    So while I knew they were all around me, I never really questioned why there were suddenly so many pills everywhere. Even my short little Jane article was just out to prove that it was possible to get these pills, not why. But there are a number of social and economic factors that caused prescription painkillers to suddenly become America’s latest obsession.
    Carol Boyd is a professor of nursing and women’s studies at the University of Michigan,