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

director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and a research scientist for the Substance Abuse Research Center. She has been studying the rise of prescription painkiller abuse since 2000.
    “Listen,” she tells me, over the phone from her Michigan office. “I’m a kid of the 1960s. Quaaludes and Valiums were swapped all the time, so it’s not that prescription pill abuse is so unusual. Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, everyone was using Miltown, a tranquilizer that later became mostly replaced by benzos.”
    But in 2000, when she was focusing her drug research on Ecstasy and other “club drugs” like Special K and GHB, she witnessed something at a sports event that she went to with her son. “I saw two different kids use someone else’s prescription asthma inhaler, and with impunity,” she says. “They just tossed it over to the next person. I decided to start including more questions about prescription drug use in our questionnaires, and we were getting hits—hits that were throwing us way off,” she said.
    “Keep in mind, the National Institute on Drug Abuse had been asking about prescription pill use in their own monitoring surveys, but the wording was such that they weren’t able to home in on what the specific pills were. Oxy and Vicodin were mixed into the same category as heroin and morphine. So our own federal questionnaires were completely off the dime and didn’t catch the epidemic in time.”
    It makes sense that there would be some flawed data out there because of the methods used to obtain these numbers. We suddenly had 32.7 million people using painkillers nonmedically, but almost all studies are based on questionnaires or interviews. This method of datacollection, called self-report, often lacks validity and reliability for several reasons. First, people tend to underreport their drug use, especially for legal but socially stigmatized drugs such as tobacco. They may also underreport drug use if they perceive a lack of privacy, as may happen when a survey is administered at school. Second, it’s often difficult to get these surveys into the hands of the people most at risk, since drug users tend to fly under the radar. And finally, the fewer users there are of a given drug, the harder it is to count them. Take heroin, for example. According to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (the most recent survey available when this book was published), 14.8 million people age twelve and older had used marijuana during the past month, and 2.4 million had used cocaine. By contrast, only 338,000 had used heroin. Reaching this sliver of the pie is complicated by the reality that many hard-core drug users lack a permanent address or are in prison.
    Dr. Boyd also became convinced that Ecstasy and club-drug use was starting to decline. “They’re just too dysphoric, they don’t mellow you out enough. I think Ecstasy will be one of those drugs, like peyote, that comes and goes. It burns itself out, then comes back around, then burns itself back out again.”
    But prescription painkillers were different. She believes there were three things culturally that were going on that contributed to this sudden rise of painkiller abuse. The first was the rise of the Internet. We suddenly had more access to information. Say someone has a mole that looks funny; he can go online and get gobs of really important information on how to take care of it. The bad part of access to that kind of information is that you can easily find out about dosing and how to use prescription drugs to get high.
    The second thing was September 11. It was harder to get other kinds of drugs into the country because of the overall security crackdown. The third was an upswing in prescribing by physicians. People with cancer were living longer, but they were also requiring more analgesics and benzos like Valium and Xanax for the pain and anxiety that comes along with debilitating diseases.
    As a result, there are now more