Prescription Drug Abuse and Chronic Pain

The issue that is unique to prescription drug abuse is that the dealer is the physician. Where I’m going to connect, where I’m going to get my drugs, is from my physician. And like any industry you have extremely reputable members, physicians who upon realizing that their patient is faking whatever the symptoms may be, they stop giving them the drugs. But there are physicians that become very well known. You just go in, pay your hundred dollars and get your prescription for 90 or 120 or 160 OxyContin a month. And those are very valuable on the street. You can service a pretty good addiction if you’ve got five or six doctors going. Or you can make quite a bit of money on the street selling it.

You can go on the Internet and get prescription drugs. I’ve done interventions on a number of individuals who do this. You go in and see a large envelope from Africa, and it’s a package filled with Vicodin. The access is there. It’s always going to be there. The denial aspect of it from the addict is: I can’t be an addict I get these from my doctor. That was true in the 1960s, almost 50 years ago, when prescriptions for Valium were going through the roof – they were known as mother’s little helper – keep mom calm. This is nothing new, prescription addiction, there’s just a wave right now, but it’s always going on.

A common difficult situation is when you have chronic pain management concerns and an addiction. People take pain medication to function and it gets away from them because it’s not being monitored properly. And that’s the thing with any addict.

During the course of sobriety, recovering people break limbs, have a need for surgery, and do things where pain medication is going to be required. So you’re going to have an addict or an alcoholic ingesting addictive substances, hopefully for very specific short periods of time, to address pain. We’re not meant to get sober and suffer. But the trick to that in recovery is never to leave an addict alone with that medication – someone else controls the medication, they have one doctor, their sponsor knows, and their home group knows. There are constant eyes on the situation and the circumstance so that this person is not left alone making decisions about the medication. I don’t care how sober you are, if you take that medication it has an effect on you, and that effect is mind altering to a certain degree.

One of the key tricks to pain management, and I’m not a doctor or a clinician, is that it’s called pain management, it’s not called pain eradication. So if you’re suffering pain at a level of seven on a scale of one to ten, that’s a pretty heavy pain load;  your ability to function is being compromised dramatically. If you take medication that drops you from a seven to a three, you’re still in pain, but you’re at a very manageable level of pain. That has to be an acceptable outcome, because if you’re trying to get that pain level to zero, now you’re really in a danger zone of trying to eradicate pain, chasing pain, and that can lead to abuse and addiction. It’s fraught with disaster.