San Diego Reader

The first time I discovered Oxycontin was in Lake Tahoe. I tried to fly, and not in a suicidal way at all. I felt so light and airy I just thought I could. “Whoa!” I had said, spreading my arms, “Are we birds right now?” I turned to my friends on the chairlift with me as I inched forward towards the edge of the seat with an excited look. My friends looked at me incredulously, slamming me back against the hard metal chair. “Are you crazy!?” they asked, “What kind of pills did you take?”

We had stopped that morning to pick up some friends for a day of snowboarding. I hurt my back the day before and was in the middle of scoping out the kitchen cabinets for some Tylenol when a friend of a friend said, “Here take these.” I swallowed down the pills before asking, “So what were those?” The kid gave me a devilish grin, “Awesomeness,” he said. “You have the time release so you won’t have as much fun, but don’t worry, your back will feel like new.” He broke up a couple of pills and dumped the insides out onto the kitchen counter, “This is how you get past the stupid time release” He rolled up a dollar pill and snorted the powder up his nose. “Now my back will feel great too!” he said with a smirk.

Luckily, I never ran into the snorter from the kitchen again. This was fortunate for reasons other than my health and how dangerously addictive Oxycontin seemed, even after just once of inadvertently swallowing a couple of pills. Evidently the snorter started stealing from all his friends to pay for the pills before he began to deal drugs to support his habit. Things got so involved he ended up leaving California in the middle of the night to evade the police, running back to his home state of Washington. This was a few years ago and the last I had heard of him he was desperately trying to wean his heroin-like addiction in rehab.

I found out Oxycontin wasn’t just in Northern California. It is in San Diego too. Downtown at the restaurant where I work, a girl fell into the habit. When she couldn’t find it, or didn’t have the money to pay for it in San Diego, she took the trolley to Tijuana where she easily got the pills for giving up things other than money.

“Crazy people snorting pills,” I thought to myself shaking my head. “Feeling able to fly wasn’t even that much fun, was it?” thinking back to that day in Tahoe.

Then my brother called. He told me he was addicted to pain pills and trying to get clean.
“Pain pills?” I asked, “What do you mean?” “Oxycontin,” he told me, “And anything else I can find that I can crush up and snort to get that rush, that high.” “Where were you getting Oxycontin??” I asked in dismay.

My brother and his girlfriend had stumbled across the pill at a college party. Simply swallowed and mixed with some alcohol, turned out Oxycontin was loads of fun! They thought the pill produced such an excellent sensation and not realizing the severity, after all it was just a prescription pain pill, they sought it out. Luckily, the girlfriend’s cousin had a prescription to Oxycontin, and what, with the economy being how it is, she was looking for a way to make some extra money. So she sold it to my brother’s 21-year-old girlfriend. They weren’t buying cocaine or heroin, only pain pills from a nice lady for an occasional Friday night. No one told them it was ridiculously addictive, even to people who take Oxycontin as a prescribed medication.

Oxycontin is just a pain pill. Just a pain pill nicknamed “Poor man’s heroin.” How about, “Easily accessible for college students”? Or maybe “Heroin-like addictive pills that people don’t realize are a huge deal”? Or even “Prescription heroin you can buy from a benign older lady”? Those are all equitable alternatives.

I can picture my brother pointing to a lady with chronic arthritis or a perhaps a cancer patient and saying, “I’ll have what you’re having! Medical Marijuana? No thanks, I'll just take some Oxycontin."