Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict by Joshua Lyon Page A

Tylenol instead, until one of her doctors finally gave her codeine instead of Vicodin.
    “That was the one drug I got where I thought, ‘Oh, I like this one,’” she says. “I definitely started taking it out of necessity, but I prolonged the prescription past the point of needing it. I had a pill form and a liquid form. But I still had tons and tons of Vicodin just sitting around. And everyone knew I had it. It was like, ‘Oh, Zoe has cancer,’ so my friends would ask me for it. And I would just give it away.”
    Zoe didn’t mind giving out her pills to friends who she thought were just using them recreationally occasionally or needed one or two to treat cramps or a migraine. “But there was one person who kept asking me for it that I felt uncomfortable about,” she says. “I knew he was having addiction problems—with heroin, I think. He seemed to be nodding off a lot at the time, and I knew he was having trouble at work because of it. I gave a few to him at first but cut him off pretty quickly. I think he might have been taking OxyContin too, and forsome reason, Oxy scares me. I associate it with street drugs, like heroin. If I’d been given Oxy for my surgeries, I never would have just handed it out to people. Vicodin just seems more controlled somehow. When I’d give it out to people I’d assume they were responsible enough not to take it all at once and OD. But I guess that’s a pretty dumb assumption.”
    Her fear of OxyContin may also stem from her father. When Zoe was nineteen, she and her brother had to take him off life support after he had succumbed completely to cancer and slipped into a coma. “This is a man who was addicted to cocaine for twenty-five years,” Zoe says. “He had a very high tolerance for drugs. When we took him off life support, the nurse had been pumping him full of morphine, and before he died, she said she’d never seen someone have that much morphine in his system and not die from a drug overdose. She said he’d been given enough to kill an elephant. When my brother and I were cleaning out his house, we discovered a huge supply of OxyContin, about $15,000 worth, street value. We considered trying to sell it, but I threw it away because I could never live with myself if someone OD’d and died from something I’d given them.”
     
    I didn’t have to deal with that fear, because I almost never shared my painkiller stash. Pot, coke, beer, even benzos, all those were meant for consuming with friends. But painkillers were mine, and initially Emily was the only one who knew when I was holding, since she was my original supplier after moving back to New York. But even when she ran out of her own stash early, and would call and ask if she could borrow some, I always lied and said I was out, too.
    I hid my bottles in the bottom of my underwear drawer, and kept my daily dose in a small gold pillbox that I’d bought for ten cents at a garage sale in Tennessee when I was in the third grade. As a kid, I’d fill with it with tiny fake diamonds pulled off my sisters’ costume jewelry and pretend it was my private fortune. For some reason I’d always kept the box, maybe anticipating its future use.
    The top of the small box is layered in wood, with a gold four-leafclover set in the center of it. For luck, I guess, that its user wouldn’t mix the wrong pills and OD. I’d unimaginatively named it Clover. I could fit a lot of Norco inside, along with generous doses of the generic Valium I’d started buying online again. Whenever I came across hydrocodone from a friend or someone who was selling at a party, I’d have to swap a lot of Norco out of the box, since the hydrocodone pills were so much larger. Clover was small enough to slip into my pocket and go unnoticed anywhere I went. And I quickly realized that no one ever asks you questions if you pop open a pillbox and swallow something directly in front of them. When I’d been taking lots of Vicodin at Jane , I’d always go