Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict Read online

  Heather blurted this fact out to her mother during an intense phone conversation. “She was saying, ‘I don’t know why you’re so fucked up,’ and I was, like, ‘Here’s why! You left me with X and he molested me. Take it and deal with it.’ And I hung up on her and proceeded to take out all my anger on her. I knew her Social Security number, and I went to Barneys and opened up a line of credit in her name and spent a massive amount of money. I also decided I wanted porcelain veneers on my teeth, so I opened up another credit account in her name and headed off to the dentist. I didn’t really want any of that shit, it was just a ‘fuck you.’ I’d never dealt with that much rage, but even at the time there was a voice inside me wondering if this was real emotion or just a by-product of the chemicals being moved around in my brain. Or maybe the pills were just the catalyst I needed to finally get that rage out of me. I still don’t know.”

  Heather’s final personal low took place when her pills were accidentally delivered to the wrong address, and she held her neighbor’s mail ransom.

  “I was out of pills and had been waiting desperately for my delivery and they hadn’t arrived. I finally got the tracking number and called FedEx. It turns out they had delivered them to a house two blocks away, and some Arabic guy who lived there had signed for them. I went absolutely crazy.”

  Heather made Derek drive her to the neighbor’s house. She climbed up his front steps and started banging on his door, but there was no answer. “So I took all of his mail,” she says, “including another package he had waiting for him, and brought it all back to the car. Derek started freaking out, he was, like, ‘You can’t steal someone’s mail! That’s illegal!’ He tried to get me to put it all back. But I didn’t care. I went home, Googled the guy’s address, and was able to get his telephone number. I kept calling until I finally got him on the phone.”

  Heather told him that if he didn’t come over to her house immediately she was going to call the police. “Which is just crazy,” she sighs. “I’d already stolen his mail, and what was I going to say? ‘Police, he’s got my drugs that I ordered through the mail!’

  “The whole experience was hitting rock bottom for me. I ended up hearing much worse stories when I finally went to rehab, but that was bad enough for me. This was a perfectly nice neighbor who I had to sit next to on the train every day.”

  At this point Heather was unemployable. Derek wasn’t making much money. “It became clear to me that I had to do something or we were going to end up in a homeless shelter,” she says.

  So she called her grandmother, the former addict. She’d been a bartender in the 1960s and had gotten hooked on Black Beauties (a popular form of trucker speed from that time period, a mix of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, one of the ingredients found in Adderall), but had been sober now for over twenty years. She told Heather she had no choice but to go to detox and start a twelve-step program.

  “I was like, there is no way I’m going to a twelve-step program,” Heather says. “It’s God-centered and I don’t believe in any of that shit.”

  But she knew she had to at least go to detox. “It was that addict mentality of all or nothing,” she says. Just like Jared’s first attempt at getting clean. “I told myself I was going to get clean tomorrow and everything is going to be taken care of.”

  Heather spent the night before she went into rehab taking every single last one of her pills. They were still too precious to her to just flush them away. The next morning Derek drove her to the closest hospital. Since he knew he couldn’t have contact with her while she was detoxing, he gave her a little notebook in which he’d written down all the things he missed about the old Heather and everything that she’d be getting back in her life. He included a picture of her taken when she was five and wrote, “Take care of this girl and love her.”

  “It broke my heart,” she says. “I knew I had to do it for Derek, even if I couldn’t do it for myself.”

  Derek took her to a hospital in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “It’s a great trauma center,” she says. “It’s where anyone in Brooklyn who gets their arm chopped off would go. But the neighborhood has its share of prostitution and drug trafficking. And the detox center admission process was a joke. It’s basically like a lotto system. There are only a certain number of beds, so if you show up and they are all taken, you have to come back the next day and try all over again. When I spoke to them on the phone before coming in, the woman on the line told me to show up really early. I had to sign a ton of papers and then give them a urine sample so they could assess how many meds I was going to need. You could go in there and say, ‘I take sixty milligrams of Xanax a day,’ but if you only have a certain level in your urine, they base your cocktail on that.”

  Heather was admitted and given a drug cocktail that included an antiseizure medication and sleeping pills. There was no treatment aspect to her detox except medication.

  Every four hours everyone would shuffle up to the front desk and get their pills, just like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Heather found it cold and impersonal. It had nothing to do with her emotional health and well-being; it was strictly about flushing out her system. And some people weren’t even taking that seriously. There was one girl in detox at the same time as Heather who was seven months pregnant, and her boyfriend checked himself in and smuggled dope in for her so she could shoot up. There was another kid there who Heather thought was a really sweet, innocent guy. Turned out he was a pimp with a twenty-girl roster. He’d only checked himself into rehab because heat from the cops had been really intense that week and he needed to get off the street.

  “Honestly,” Heather said, “I was probably the only person in there who had even set foot in a college. The education level was appalling. But I felt like I could identify with these people, even if they felt there was no way in hell I could identify with them.”

  The detox program really pushed the twelve steps. By day 7, Heather’s time was up and she was sent home. “I still didn’t want to do the twelve steps, so I came up with this whole plan how I was going to do yoga and start chanting. And for the first three days home, I felt awesome. I was in the ‘pink cloud,’ which is a rehab term for how you feel when you first get out, and everything seems brand-new again. I could hear birds chirping and food tasted incredible and everything smelled better. And then I hit a wall.”

  Heather later learned she was experiencing post-acute withdrawal symptoms, which is a series of withdrawal symptoms that can still manifest even after you’ve cleared the drugs from your system. For Heather, one of these symptoms was panic attacks—the very reason she’d gotten into pills in the first place.

  She went back to her original doctor and explained her symptoms, and he wrote her another prescription for Xanax, even though she admitted to him that she had just gotten out of detox.

  After that bottle ran out, she went to her friend Jen, who was working as a stripper at one of New York City’s most popular strip clubs.

  “Apparently there’s a massive pill culture in strip clubs,” Heather says. “Just huge. There are a lot of doctors who frequent them and keep the girls amply supplied, so Jen always had some. She hated seeing me go through any sort of withdrawal and would share what she had with me. After a while she started to resist, so I’d just tell her that I thought I was about to have a seizure. I’d whip that line out and manipulate her into giving me more. She was one of my oldest childhood friends.”

  One evening, Derek watched as she discreetly tried to put something in her mouth. She claimed it was an aspirin, that she had a headache, but he forced her to open her mouth and saw several pills under her tongue. Heather broke down, saying, “I have to stay on it.”

  Derek had no clue how to help her and felt like he was starting to go crazy himself. He felt terrible about getting in her face and being angry, because he could see just how bad it was for her. She was shitting and vomiting constantly, and sometimes not making it to the bathroom in time for either. “I’d be hot, then cold, th
en hot again, coupled with the blackest depression I’d ever had, times a thousand. I felt like I’d be better off dead, that killing myself would be easier than going through it. More than anything, it made me understand why people stay drug addicts.”

  Derek started doing research online about real rehabilitation facilities, and checking with his work insurance to see if it would cover any of the costs. Luckily it did, except for the copay.

  Six weeks had gone by since Heather had gotten out of detox. They went to Derek’s family’s home in Long Island for Thanksgiving dinner; by noon Heather was sleeping while Derek was in the kitchen talking with his family.

  “My sister was pregnant at the time,” he says, “and my mother was asking me why I hadn’t been around much to support her when the rest of the family was so excited. I just started crying and saying, ‘You have no idea what’s going on in my life.’”

  But Derek had forgotten that his mother had spent years watching her husband suffer as a heroin addict. She recognized a lot of the same symptoms in Heather and told him, “I think I have an idea.”

  Derek told his parents about the different rehab centers he’d looked up online and how much money he had to come up with, and his father simply said, “I’ll pay for it.”

  Derek and Heather selected a facility in Miami, Florida, because of their emphasis on a painless detox. “When I spoke to them on the phone, they really catered to my fear of withdrawal. They promised that I would have a cocktail of drugs to slowly wean me off, and that I would feel no pain whatsoever. And the pictures on their website showed a beautiful beach. I was so excited, I thought I was going to a yoga spa retreat. I brought all of my yoga clothes, chanting CDs, Saki bath soak and perfume.”

  Except for the yoga clothes, it was all immediately confiscated upon her arrival. “The center was actually located in a strip mall that sat on a canal filled with Budweiser cans and alligators,” Heather sighs. “There was one enormous room with a huge television and about eighty zombies in various states of withdrawal. There was a back patio overlooking the canal. It was the social nexus of the place. People who were starting to get their feistiness back would sit out there smoking from 8:00 A.M. until 1:00 A.M.”

  Heather’s cocktail consisted of various painkillers, the muscle relaxant Soma, sleeping aids, but no benzodiazepines. “There was a lot more pill addiction in this detox center than what I had experienced in Brooklyn. In fact almost everyone there had some sort of pill issue, even if they were mainly there for something else, like alcohol or heroin. There was one nurse who was coming off an insane amount of morphine. She was doing a six-month detox program in order to get off it.”

  In fact, Heather quickly discovered that there were a lot of nurses in her detox program, most of whom had become addicted to painkillers they were stealing from the hospitals they worked in. And through them, Heather learned how to manipulate the system to get more painkillers.

  “There was one who was going through her tenth detox program. She told me to tell the nurse on duty that my foot hurt, and specifically that it was a shooting pain up my leg,” she says. And it worked, she got additional handouts. Heather quickly came up with her own stories, such as migraines and her tried-and-true sciatica that worked to get her more painkillers.

  “I think I was able to get away with so much because I was the only one who seemed normal there,” she says. Unlike some programs, “there was no scheduled time to get up in the morning, because a lot of people were on meds that made them sleep a lot. There were some people there who I never once saw open their eyes. I was one of the only people who got up early every morning, showered, dressed, and put on makeup, instead of walking around in my pajamas with a blanket, screaming and wailing.”

  Heather was the good girl, and because of that none of the staff suspected her of abusing the system. But even though Heather was putting on a brave face, she was still tortured inside. “My body was just demented,” she says. “I’d gone from shitting constantly to not being able to poop for three days because of all the painkillers I was on and additionally scamming. I just remember lying on the bathroom floor and thinking to myself, ‘I’m in Miami, trying to shove a suppository up my butt. What the hell am I doing here?’”

  Every night, members of the local AA chapters would show up to lead group sessions. “One of them kept hitting on me in this really pervy way. I was in fucking detox—I couldn’t believe he didn’t have any other available choices,” she says.

  Heather was also seeing a therapist every day, one she was initially distrustful of, mainly because she didn’t feel like she could trust anyone. But about halfway through the detox, she started to connect with her therapist. At this point she had met so many people who had been inside the detox system and knew how to manipulate it that she realized she didn’t want to be that person.

  “This was already my second time in, and it just hit me that if I kept it up I’d be back again and again and again, just like the rest of the people in there. I knew my family didn’t have the money to help me out, and Derek’s family certainly wasn’t going to pay for me to go again. I knew that Derek would leave me if I didn’t start taking this seriously, and then I’d have no one.”

  So Heather admitted to her therapist that she had been lying to the nurses. The therapist warned the nurses not to give Heather anything else, but it was a moot point because she stopped trying to get anything else besides what was already being prescribed for her.

  At the end of her detox, Heather had the choice either to go back home or to go to a rehab center. Many of the people whom she’d befriended told her she should just go home. “They’d say, ‘Come on, look at all these other people in here. You’re so much better than them,’” she says. “But that was the game I’d been playing my whole life. I knew I wasn’t.”

  Heather met with “ambassadors” from rehab centers around the state and selected one that offered morning meditation and yoga. “I was like, that’s the one for me, that’s the stuff that’s going to keep me sober.”

  The center was located in Fort Pierce, Florida. “It should have been called Fort Piss,” Heather says, “because it was seriously the armpit of Florida. There should have been an old blues man on every corner, wailing about how horrible life is there. Maybe there are some parts of upstate New York that might compare to how shitty and rundown and left behind this town was. The rehab center was in another strip mall, but the living quarters were in an apartment complex called Virginia Gator Park. It was a gated complex, but also a disgusting nightmare. There was a pool you’d never want to even put a toe into and rows of apartments for the rehab people, right next door to apartments inhabited by drug dealers.”

  The yoga and meditation that Heather had been so looking forward to consisted of rising at 6:00 A.M., making her way down to the beach with the other patients, and standing in a circle while praising Jesus. “I was furious,” she says. “There was a Jewish guy in the program and he and I just clung to each other.”

  Heather resisted the program’s twelve-step leanings every step of the way. But she knew she had to figure out a way to make rehab a positive experience for herself, especially since Derek was begging her over the phone to stay. But her experiences at this particular facility were pretty horrifying, starting with the brutal gang rape of a new patient whom Heather had befriended.

  “It was her first day at rehab,” Heather remembers, “and she was being admitted for heroin addiction. There was something about her that reminded me of Janis Joplin and I was just drawn to her. While she was checking into the apartment complex, we started talking and getting along and I invited her over for coffee. I wanted to take her under my wing.”

  The apartments in the complex designated for the rehabbers were monitored by what Heather describes as “a group of awesome big fat sassy black ladies, who were really sweet but had no real training.” Their job was to get people settled in their rooms, wake them up in the morning, ferry them back and forth between the comple
x and the strip mall rehab center, and do random room checks for contraband material.

  Heather said good-bye to the new girl, Tina, as she finished her check-in. She noticed some of the local drug dealers hanging out nearby, but didn’t think anything of it. They were always around. After Tina had checked in and was waiting for her room assignment, she was left alone on the porch.

  Heather came back after a while to see if Tina had finished check-in so they could hang out, but she was nowhere to be found. Heather asked Missy, the woman who had admitted her, if she had seen Tina, but she hadn’t. After a few hours had passed and there was still no sign of her, Heather became frantic. She forced Missy to come with her to knock on the apartment door of the dealers she had seen lingering nearby.

  The door opened and there were several men inside who claimed not to speak English and shut the door in their faces. They were on the second story of the apartment complex and were standing outside the door when a wayward, flea-ridden, three-legged Chihuahua hobbled up the stairs toward them. The dog’s owner ran up after it and whispered to Heather and Missy that he had heard through the grapevine that the men had a girl inside their apartment. Missy pounded on the door again and yelled that she was calling the police. She and Heather ran to the office to make the call, when the apartment door opened and all the men ran outside, hopped into a van, and drove off. The apartment door locked behind them. When the police arrived, they knocked it down and found Tina cowering naked in the bathroom. She had been raped repeatedly after being lured inside with the promise of a fix.

  “It was just this awful, horrible realization that even though we were in rehab, we weren’t safe,” Heather says. “When I got upset about it, one of the counselors made some crack to me about how I must have seen worse on the streets. I was, like, ‘I’ve never been on the fucking streets. My streets were carpeted doctors’ offices with old copies of Parenting magazine on the coffee tables.’”