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

Author:Joshua Lyon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9781401310226
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

How to Destroy a Doctor

BOBBY’S SURGERY WAS A success, and my younger sister showed up to take over so I could get back to work in New York. I was proud of myself for not stealing any of her pills, and ashamed of myself for feeling proud about something that should just come naturally to a person. But it helped to know that I was not alone in my desire. Sadly, stealing pills from elderly relatives is pretty common.

Diversion of pills takes many forms. In most cases, doctors are legitimately prescribing medication for people who are in chronic pain. Some doctors are less than scrupulous, but they are the minority. It’s quite possible that early refills for people in chronic pain, especially for the elderly, are needed because someone has been pilfering some of the pills, either for personal use (like I almost did) or to sell. Unfortunately, it’s the doctors who are being prosecuted, when, in most cases, they were just trying to help a patient suffering from intolerable pain. There’s a huge difference between the doctor who helps operate an Internet pill mill and the doctor who gets busted for legitimately prescribing painkillers to people who need them for their intended purpose.

In February 2002, a doctor in Florida, James Graves, was convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of four patients for whom he had prescribed OxyContin. He was sentenced to sixty-three years in prison. This was at the height of the OxyContin panic, when the media was collectively ejaculating over the idea of hillbilly heroin. Dr. Graves argued that he had been prescribing the medication legitimately; he even made his patients sign “pain contracts” promising to follow his instructions. Michael Gibson, Dr. Graves’s lawyer, was quoted as saying, “If a patient lied, there was little Dr. Graves could do about it. Addicts are not dumb. They lie, they make things up and exaggerate things.”

This is absolutely true. I know that toward the end of my abuse I could have walked into any doctor’s office and walked out with a prescription for some sort of opiate. (That is, other than my real doctor. He’s too smart for that.) I had researched all the right things to say, knew all the problems, such as migraines, that could manifest real pain without showing any physical symptoms.

In January 2002, Barry Meier, a reporter for the New York Times, interviewed Dr. William Hurwitz, a pain management specialist and lawyer located in McLean, Virginia, in connection with the Graves trial. Hurwitz stated that “many doctors like himself believe that large daily doses of narcotics such as OxyContin are an acceptable way to treat chronic pain. But he says his own experience has shown him that such practices can quickly bring a doctor to the attention of law enforcement; in the past decade his medical license has been suspended and revoked over narcotics prescriptions; it has since been reinstated.”

Dr. Hurwitz went on: “When [the DEA] sees anybody prescribing these meds they think the worst and presume the worse, and if there is a bad outcome they act as aggressively as they can.

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